NEW YORK 



NEW YORK 

A SERIES OF WOOD ENGRAVINGS IN COLOUR 

AND A NOTE ON COLOUR PRINTING BY 

RUDOLPH RUZICKA 

WITH PROSE IMPRESSIONS OF THE CITY BY 

WALTER PRICHARD EATON 




NEW YORK 

THE GROLIER CLUB 

1915 



s 

£7 



COPYRIGHT, 1915, 
BY THE GROLIER CLUB OF THE CITY 01" NEW YORK 



MAY -4 1915 
©3I.A:J97840 



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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

A NOTE ON COLOUR PRINTING xi 

I A NEW ANSWER TO AN ANCIENT RIDDLE 3 

II AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS 15 

III THE RRIDGES 27 

IV THE OLD TOWN 39 
V THE SQUARES 51 

VI FIFTH AVENUE 63 

VII BROADWAY 75 

VIII RIVERSIDE DRIVE 87 

IX KNOWLEDGE AND THE HOUSE-TOPS 99 

X THE END OF THE ISLAND 111 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

I 
DOWNTOWN, A VIEW FROM UNION SQUARE 3 

RROAD STREET AT WALL 7' 

RROADWAY FROM THE POST-OFFICE 12 

II 

NEW YORK FROM RROOKLYN 15 
MUNICIPAL OFFICE RUILDING IN CONSTRUCTION 19 : 

WEST STREET 24 

III 

EAST RIVER RRIDGES 27 

QUEENSBORO' BRIDGE 31 - 

HIGH BRIDGE 36 

IV 

ST. JOHN'S CHAPEL IN VARICK STREET 39 

WASHINGTON SQUARE 43 

THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, CHELSEA 48 

V 

FOURTH AVENUE AT UNION SQUARE 51 

MADISON SQUARE 55 
QUAKER MEETING HOUSE, STUYVESANT SQUARE 60 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 
VI 

FIFTH AVENUE 63 

THE PLAZA 67 

CENTRAL PARK 72 

VII 

TIMES SQUARE 75 

RROADWAY FROM HERALD SQUARE 79 

THE PASSING OF THE RROWNSTONE DWELLING 84 

VIII 

RIVERSIDE DRIVE PARK 87 

THE VIADUCT 91 

HARLEM CLIFFS 96 

IX 

CATHEDRAL OF ST. JOHN THE DIVINE 99 

COLUMRIA UNIVERSITY 103 

FOUNTAIN IN THE UNIVERSITY PARK 108 

X 

"ITALIAN INFORMAL GARDENS" 111 

THE HARLEM RIVER 115 

FORT GEORGE 120 



A NOTE 
ON COLOUR PRINTING 



A NOTE ON 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF COLOUR PRINTING 

FROM WOOD ENGRAVINGS 

An instinctive love of colour often found expression in 
the art of wood engraving, as it did in all arts. The ear- 
liest examples of European wood engraving, dating from 
the beginning of the fifteenth century, were pictures of 
sacred subjects cut in bold outlines on blocks of wood 
and impressed on paper by means of rubbing. Their 
popular appeal, apart from the subject, rested, no doubt, 
in their bright colours, applied by hand with the aid of 
brushes and stencils. This method of colouring continued 
in use long after the invention of printing in the middle 
of the fifteenth century, and although even then efforts 
were made to print colours from wood blocks, they sel- 
dom remained unassisted by the colourist's hand, so that 
colour printing proper may be said to begin with the 
invention of engraving and printing in a manner called 
"chiaroscuro" or "clair-obscur." 

This took place at the beginning of the sixteenth cen- 
tury in Germany, where wood engraving in black and 
white and printing on the hand press had already reached 
a great height of perfection. The earlier efforts in colour 
printing, such as the perfectly impressed initial in Fust 
and Schoeffer's Psalter (1457), Ratdolt's Sphaera Mundi 



xii A NOTE ON 

of Sacrobosco (1485), the Book of St. Albans (1486) and 
the more elaborate Book of Hours of Jean du Pre (1490), 
were confined to simple, flat colouring of outline blocks 
of initials, heraldic shields, diagrams and, in the last in- 
stance, of borders. It remained for the great German 
wood engravers of the sixteenth century to extend colour 
printing to pictures. 

At first the chiaroscuro was hardly more than a repro- 
duction of a pen drawing made on coloured paper and 
heightened with gold, silver or white. Indeed, in the first 
example of a print of that kind, Cranach's St. George 
(1507), the procedure is identically the same as that 
which an artist might follow: a solid tone of colour, blue 
in this instance, was spread upon a sheet of paper, on 
which, an outline engraving in black being first im- 
pressed, the high lights were added in gold from a second 
block. In another example of the same print, the high 
lights are printed in a kind of white substance, probably 
intended to hold gold or silver. Possibly the difficulty of 
representing high lights in this fashion led to the next 
step, which was to establish definitely the method of 
making chiaroscuros: the printing over all the paper of 
a tint block which was solid except for the incisions indi- 
cating the high lights. This did away with the necessity 
of painting a tint over the paper and obviated the diffi- 
culty of properly registering the accents of light, giving, 
besides, the advantage of white paper showing through 
the incisions. Jost de Negker, a native of Antwerp, is 
credited with having invented this technically direct 
method at Augsburg in 1508. It is certain that he carried 
it to great perfection in his engravings after Burgkmair. 



COLOUR PRINTING xiii 

Besides Cranach in Wittemberg and Burgkmair in Augs- 
burg, Hans Baldung Grien employed the method in Stras- 
burg about the year 1510, as did Johann Waechtlin, an 
Alsatian painter and engraver who lived in Strasburg 
between the years 1509 and 1519. In some prints by 
Waechtlin, who engraved his own designs, and notably 
in the Baumgartner portrait by Jost de Negker after 
Burgkmair, the black outline block is abandoned, the 
darkest tone being a dark gray, used to accentuate the 
shadows only. A tint of intermediate value is utilized 
for most of the detail; this tint and the dark gray are im- 
pressed one after another upon the lightest tint which 
serves for the high lights. A greater unity of effect was 
thus obtained and the quality of low relief, a character- 
istic of the chiaroscuro print, further emphasized. 

In view of the early German work described, the claim 
made that Ugo da Carpi was the inventor of engraving 
and printing in chiaroscuro has but little ground, in spite 
of Vasari's assurance and the grant to Ugo in 1516 of 
copyright privileges by the Venetian Senate. The year 
1516 is the date of the first print known to have been exe- 
cuted by him in a manner which is the same as the ear- 
lier northern work. Yet it is certain that Ugo, himself a 
painter, introduced the art into Italy, and, inspired by 
such masters as Raphael, Titian and Parmegiano, whose 
drawings he reproduced, brought the art to its highest 
development. This may be observed in what is perhaps 
the most spirited of his chiaroscuros, the "Diogenes" 
after Parmegiano, for which four blocks were used. The 
colours of this print, while kept in the consistently low 
key of gray greens employed in a manner not unlike that 



xiv A NOTE ON 

of the Baumgartner portrait, are boldly treated in sweep- 
ing lines and broad masses. 

The substitution for the black key block of dark gray 
or black spots used for shadows and a greater variety of 
colours employed in broad masses, are the characteristics 
of the best prints by Ugo da Carpi and his followers, An- 
tonio da Trento and Giuseppe Nicolo Vicentino, pupils 
of Parmegiano. Their prints more nearly approach 
reproductions of oil paintings; certain crudenesses in 
execution, as well as the scale in which they were often 
made, also suggest their use as wall decoration. Toward 
the end of the sixteenth century, Andrea Andreani of 
Mantua published many chiaroscuros, some of his own 
workmanship, often prints of great size divided into sec- 
tions, others reprints from old blocks (into which he in- 
serted his own mark) by Ugo da Carpi, da Trento, Vicen- 
tino and Alessandro Ghadini. Bartolomeo Coriolano of 
Bologna, in his engravings after Guido Reni which re- 
sembled the early German work in their black outlines 
and brown tints, carried the technique into the middle of 
the seventeenth century, adding nothing new to it, in 
spite of the huge dimensions of prints which won him 
public recognition and honours. 

In Germany, the race of Great and Little Masters 
having come to an end, the art of wood engraving in gen- 
eral declined, the refinements of the copper plate re- 
placing it in popular favour. 

The first use of the copper plate in connection with 
blocks engraved for chiaroscuro printing and also the 
first appearance in any form of the chiaroscuro as book 
illustration, is found in Hubert Goltzius' "Lives of the 



COLOUR PRINTING xv 

Roman Emperors," a book published at Antwerp in 1557. 
The illustrations consist of portraits designed to imitate 
medallions, the outlines etched on copper and printed 
over two tones of sepia, these evidently printed from 
blocks which were engraved in relief. Hendrick, an- 
other member of the Goltzius family and a noted copper 
engraver, executed a number of chiaroscuro prints in 
the pure wood-block method. The influence of the suave 
copper-engraved line is in evidence in the black key 
blocks of his oval prints, designs of mythological sub- 
jects. Of simpler character are the few charming land- 
scapes Goltzius engraved in black line and two tones 
of colour. Equally well known, though of no greater 
technical interest, are the chiaroscuros by Christopher 
Jegher, made after designs which Rubens himself is said 
to have drawn on the wood. Jegher also engraved en- 
tirely on wood in black outline and a brown tint a "Lives 
of the Roman Emperors" for an edition published by 
Moretus at Antwerp in 1645. 

Jan Lievens, the only one of the school of Rembrandt 
to engrave on wood, designed and engraved a number of 
fine portraits, making happy use in some of them of a 
second block printed in brown. The brown colour, em- 
ployed in some of the earliest German chiaroscuros and 
often chosen for prints in one tone and black, was also 
used by Paul Moreelse, the painter and architect, in the 
two graceful prints made by him in 1612. Some small 
chiaroscuros of much charm were produced in the 
Netherlands in the seventeenth century, probably by the 
painter Abraham Rloemaert. Many of his designs were 
engraved by his son Frederick, in black outlines etched 



xvi A NOTE ON 

on copper and coloured by tones of brown from the 
wood, a style that was to find even greater favour later in 
the eighteenth century. 

Elisha Kirkall, born in Sheffield about 1682, was the 
first English chiaroscurist. This versatile engraver pro- 
duced twelve large colour prints between 1722 and 1724. 
Though inspired in subject by the early Italian work, 
his colour prints were really mezzotints over an etched 
ground, to which tones of sepia were added from blocks 
engraved in relief. The traditional method of making 
colour prints was temporarily revived in Venice by that 
talented amateur, Count Antonio Maria Zanetti, who en- 
graved and published in 1749 a collection of chiaroscuros 
after drawings by Parmegiano and other old masters. 
More important were the efforts made in Venice by the 
Englishman J. B. Jackson, the alleged pupil of Kirkall, to 
print in colours from the wood. Count Zanetti was prob- 
ably instrumental in acquainting Jackson with the best 
examples of the Italian work, when the latter came to 
Venice after his rather unsuccessful attempt to practise 
wood engraving in Paris. His large prints after the old 
masters, produced in Venice (1744) in the usual manner, 
are of smaller significance than his endeavours, in a series 
of landscapes, to print pictures in their "proper colours" 
— in colours that are independent of the values of light 
and shade. Such a departure from the traditional use of 
colour in this branch of the graphic arts may have been 
due in some measure to the recurrent experiments in 
colour printing from plates engraved in intaglio, of 
which the most remarkable was the application to the 
mezzotint process of the three-colour principle by Le 



COLOUR PRINTING xvii 

Blon, demonstrated by him in Holland in 1704 and later 
exploited in England. Returning to England in 1746, 
Jackson tried the manufacture of wall paper, utilizing 
his knowledge of colour printing to this end. It was 
mainly for the advertising of this unsuccessful venture 
that he published, in 1754, "An Essay on the Invention of 
Engraving and Printing in Chiaro Oscuro . . . the Ap- 
plication of it to the making Paper Hangings of taste . . ." 
Of all the English chiaroscurists, Jackson went farthest 
in colour experiments, claiming with some justice in his 
Essay the invention of "ten positive tints, whereas Hugo 
di Carpi only knew four." 

Nicholas Le Sueur, the last of a long line of wood en- 
gravers, was the chief exponent of the chiaroscuro in 
France. His work in that method may best be studied in 
the pretentious "Recueil d'Estampes," reproductions of 
pictures in the great French collections, the publication 
of which was begun in 1729 by M. A. de Crozat. In the 
two parts that were issued, besides the numerous copper 
engravings, there are about thirty large prints in chiaros- 
curo, some engraved by Le Sueur entirely on wood, the 
rest in the popular combination of the etched black out- 
line printed from copper plates which Count de Caylus 
engraved, to which tones of colour were added from 
blocks furnished by Le Sueur. Contemporary with him 
and also the last and most famous of generations of 
wood engravers, Jean Baptiste Papillon had an enthusi- 
astic love for his art. Besides engraving a vast num- 
ber of book decorations and illustrations, many of which 
he designed, he also wrote, in the course of some thirty 
years, the "Traite Historique et Pratique de la Gravure 



xviii A NOTE ON 

en Bois," which was published in 1766 in two volumes. 
His enthusiasm for the art led him into some fantastic 
statements in the "Traite Historique," but the second 
volume, "Traite Pratique," devoted to the technique as 
practised before the burin came into general use, shows 
Papillon's great knowledge of his craft. The second vol- 
ume also contains a valuable description of the manner 
of engraving and printing chiaroscuros and is accom- 
panied by a suite of four progressive proofs and the 
completed print, the whole excellently demonstrating the 
process. 

The refinements of copper engraving completely dom- 
inated wood engraving in the eighteenth and indirectly 
the greater part of the nineteenth century. Throughout 
the eighteenth century the wood engraver tried hard to 
imitate the delicate effects of copper engraving, until, in 
the nineteenth, he nearly succeeded in this by accepting 
the burin, the tool that had hitherto been employed on 
metal alone. The Le Blon three-colour method already 
alluded to found some imitators, though a more popular 
medium for the colour print was the stipple engraving. 
The common mode of engraving being on copper, wood 
was sometimes resorted to in the futile efforts made to 
imitate the early Italian chiaroscurists — the original 
method of producing chiaroscuros, by means of wood 
blocks alone, was practised only in the spirit of a "lost 
art" by a few devoted amateurs of engraving. 

The beginning of the nineteenth century saw the birth 
of lithography, in which experiments in colour were al- 
most immediately tried. But before they achieved the 
commercial success which in our own time was so com- 



COLOUR PRINTING xix 

pletely eclipsed by the photo-mechanical processes, much 
had been accomplished in colour printing from wood 
engravings. The already mentioned attempt made by 
Jackson in the previous century, to print "proper col- 
ours" from wood, was probably the first effort of the 
sort in Europe. Excepting the work of the little known 
German engraver F. W. Gubitz, which Bewick praises so 
highly in his "Memoir," practically nothing further was 
attempted until Savage's important experiments. 

The researches into the making of coloured printing 
inks and their improvement led William Savage, a 
printer who settled in London in 1797, to the application 
of colours to book illustrations and decorations, and to 
the reproduction of drawings and water colours. These 
experiments were published by Savage in his "Practical 
Hints on Decorative Printing" between the years 1818 
and 1823. Covering the traditional chiaroscuro method 
by examples and by the translation of Papillon's de- 
scription of the process, Savage also demonstrated the 
feasibility of reproducing paintings in water colours, 
choosing for his purpose some characteristic English 
water colours executed in flat, definite washes. For each 
one of these washes, or tones of colour, a block was en- 
graved and the design built up by successive impres- 
sions. While Savage was remarkably successful in ren- 
dering the values and effects of water colours executed 
in flat washes, in undertaking the reproduction of paint- 
ings in full modeling, he could not but fail, as in the one 
instance, where he used twenty-nine different blocks. 

The method often employed in the eighteenth cen- 
tury of copper plates used in connection with blocks 



xx A NOTE ON 

engraved in relief (Kirkall, Le Sueur, etc.), Jackson's 
endeavours to imitate paintings in their true colours and 
Savage's more successful achievements along similar 
lines, were adroitly combined and popularized by George 
Baxter after the year 1834. Baxter employed for the 
key plates sometimes mezzotint or aquatint, sometimes 
lithography. The colour applied to these key plates was 
no longer that of the chiaroscuro.but of full colour value, 
such as Jackson strove for and Savage succeeded in pro- 
ducing. During some twenty-five years, Baxter manu- 
factured and published a great quantity of these prints, 
to which, owing to the many processes promiscuously 
employed, the name "Baxter print" seems to be the fit- 
ting one to apply. Among the over-illustrated gift books 
of the fifties and sixties, it is refreshing to come upon the 
work of Edmund Evans, who began his career as colour 
printer in 1851. Although his early work was in the elab- 
orate style of colour printing then popular, he never 
combined with wood engraving methods foreign to it. 
In the seventies such artists as Walter Crane, Randolph 
Caldecott and Kate Greenaway found at his Racquet 
Court Press faithful interpretation for their charming 
books for children. 

As the engraver became increasingly more able to re- 
produce any effect of the brush, so also he became more 
subservient to the artist, both losing regard for the es- 
sential qualities of wood engraving. The early chiar- 
oscuro print and the better known Japanese colour print 
(which it is beyond the scope of this note to describe) 
have a charm due to the direct means employed and to 
a close understanding between the artist and the en- 



COLOUR PRINTING xxi 

graver. The development of the European method of 
colour printing from the wood was often interrupted 
by the introduction of new methods of engraving; with 
the invention of the lithographic and the mechanical 
processes, the art practically ceased to be practised. In 
Japan, on the other hand, colour printing enjoyed a con- 
tinual development, from its origin in the early part of 
the eighteenth to its decline in the sixties of the nine- 
teenth century. The rich results of this uninterrupted 
development of the Japanese print captivated the Eu- 
ropean artist when he became acquainted with it in 
the eighties and nineties. Already the artist in Europe, 
whose relation to the graphic arts has always been inti- 
mate, had begun to turn to wood with new interest. The 
discovery of the Japanese print and study of the older 
European traditions of colour printing encouraged him 
to experiment more freely in a medium which was then 
in the hands of experts who competed in vain with the 
photo-mechanical processes. The artist himself now 
turned to wood, engraving his own designs, experiment- 
ing not only in black and white, but in colour as well. 
Some results of this artistic enterprise may be seen in 
many of the best books published in Europe within the 
last fifteen years. The exposition of the "Societe de la 
Gravure sur Bois Originale" in Paris in 1912, to which 
forty-one artist-engravers contributed over two hundred 
and sixty-six exhibits, and the more recent Exposition of 
Graphic Arts at Leipsic have clearly demonstrated that 
there is new vitality in the art, the traditions of which 
extend over five centuries. 

R.R. 



I 

A NEW ANSWER 
TO AN ANCIENT RIDDLE 




I 

A NEW ANSWER 
TO AN ANCIENT RIDDLE 

With the birth and rapid growth of the skyscraper in 
the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century began the 
transformation of many an American city; and now, as 
we enter the second decade of the Twentieth Century, 
we are confronted with the necessity for new definitions 
of architectural effectiveness and even of beauty. This 



4 NEW YORK 

is, indeed, an age of redefinition. We are redefining 
Liberty in America, or attempting to, and Society and 
Duty. The phrase "Big Business" has leapt into the 
language, because the thing itself has shot up into the 
economic structure, even as our skyscrapers have shot 
up on every street, and with the problems "Big Busi- 
ness" presents we are now wrestling. All these prob- 
lems, these demands for redefinition, social, economic, 
aesthetic, are most insistent, not to say clamorous, on 
Manhattan Island. Our greatest contrasts of rich and 
poor, our biggest business, our tallest skyscrapers, our 
most chaotic jumbles of architectural styles and archi- 
tectural levels, our most strident individualism, are 
found in the old city of New York, the heart of the 
greater city which since 1898 has included Brooklyn, the 
Bronx and Staten Island. A rib of rock between two riv- 
ers, the pigmy Man has swarmed over and under our 
Island; he has bored through its bowels, and piled it 
thick with mortared mountains, and from its sides flung 
leaping spans of steel across the sundering waters. 
Through the canons he has made, Man hustles and bus- 
tles, creating more perplexities than he can solve, very 
little concerned with the beauty or ugliness of it all, a 
pragmatical pigmy, intent upon the hour and the "cash 
value" thereof. Yet what he has made smites mightily 
on every sense, and in reflective mood one seeks to find 
the secret of its charm, for charm it has to any not blind- 
ed by convention, the convention of level sky line and 
architectural uniformity. 

Most of us who call ourselves New Yorkers, and are 
secretly proud to call ourselves such however much we 



A NEW ANSWER 5 

may publicly revile our city, have at one time or another 
approached Manhattan in a spirit of wonder and adven- 
ture; each one "cometh from afar," on the search for 
fame or fortune in this commercial metropolis by the 
sea. Some, babbling alien tongues, come up the Bay on 
great ships, and their first sight of New York is the 
strange spectacle of mortared Himalayas rising from the 
water. Some come from staid New England villages or 
rolling farms or the freedom of the West. Their trains 
draw in to the city through the urban spawn of factories, 
shanties, tenements, which spread for miles over the 
surrounding country. I think I shall never forget the 
morning I drew near New York. Fresh from college, high 
hearted, hopeful, I left Boston by a midnight train, and 
awoke in the Bronx. I lay in my berth and drew up the 
shade. We were passing along an embankment, through 
a wilderness of tenements. Close beside the track, they 
flashed by in never ceasing procession, broken at regular 
intervals by the vista of a cross street showing them in 
endless perspective to the west, and broken between 
streets at regular intervals by the clothes-wells behind, 
hung layer on layer with garments, like a strange gar- 
den. It has amused me since to hear those garments 
called "the short and simple flannels of the poor" (by 
Oliver Herford, of course); but I found no amusement 
in them that morning. High-hearted hope was suddenly 
dead within me. A great homesickness for a green New 
England village filled my bosom, and a great sense of 
depression. Such miles on miles of ugly dwellings, cave 
dwellings where people lived in layers! Such barren, 
dirty streets, with never a touch of green! Such a mighty 



6 NEW YORK 

swarming of humanity! The very mass of it bore down 
upon me like a weight. Who was I amid these millions? 
We rushed into the tunnel, not then equipped with elec- 
tric power, and the smell of smoke and gas sickened me. 
Yet I came out of the station into the gracious, beautiful 
residential streets on Murray Hill, and smelled the lilacs 
abloom on Park Avenue. My spirits revived with that fa- 
miliar odour. I looked about me anew at the city I was 
to call my home, and the wonder of it then has never left 
me, nor the charm. 

The wonder is the constant marvel at its size. The 
charm is compounded of many elements, of the size 
again, of the variety, of the ceaseless play of light and 
shadow, haze and clarity, of the dominant utility at 
unexpected corners laid suddenly low by beauty, of the 
endless surprises to the pictorial sense, of the cosmopoli- 
tanism of it all, the hurry and strut and bustle, the never 
ending ground stream of a variegated humanity, flowing 
through open square and deep-sunk canon, at once cre- 
ator and dependent — midgets who have moulded moun- 
tains and who have then been moulded by them, played 
upon by the environment they have created, till they are 
shaped into the New Yorker of today, striving yet self- 
satisfied, ardent yet smug, clever yet lacking in sensi- 
tiveness, American yet of every race under heaven. 

For more than a decade since those lilacs on Murray 
Hill woke hope again in my bosom, I have worked and 
wandered in New York, I have watched it in all seasons 
and at all hours, I have seen old buildings fall and new 
and greater ones arise as if by magic almost in a night, 
I have fought my own little battles in its social life and 



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A NEW ANSWER 9 

joyed in them, and loved the little corner of the town 
where I lived almost as one loves the village of his birth. 
In the great chaos of our town I have found endless 
charm, and beauties recognized and conventional as 
well as beauties new and perplexing. To write of them 
is a pleasure, for to write of them is to share them. The 
city is, supposedly, preeminently social. It is to the 
country we turn for those aesthetic satisfactions which 
come to the spirit through the pictorial sense. That is 
sometimes a grave mistake, for to those of us who are of 
necessity city pent it brings only fret and longing. Stone 
walls do not a prison make to him who can find in Madi- 
son Square at twilight a Japanese screen of Gargantuan 
proportions or at his feet see unexpectedly a modern 
skyscraper looking at its own reflection in a forest pool 
— the Plaza Hotel all agleam when evening comes, mir- 
rored on the lake in Central Park. Indeed, we have but 
to look with George Washington from the steps of the 
Sub-Treasury and see the classic white columns of the 
Stock Exchange rising out of a black sea of humanity 
like a Venetian palace from its canal, to find in the busi- 
est mart, where the human press is thickest, a stirring 
challenge to pictorial enjoyment. Perhaps, after all, the 
ultimate secret of New York's charm is found in this 
element of surprise; on a scale that almost overpowers, 
the sudden revelation comes, amid apparent ugliness, of 
the magnificently pictorial. The contrast is always acci- 
dental, always unpremeditated. The city grew like a 
windsown garden, and nameless flowers from far away 
startle amid the weeds. No well trained municipal gar- 
dener would plant a skyscraper beside a brown stone 



10 NEW YORK 

dwelling, of course. Therefore he would never achieve 
that tower against the twilight sky, pricked out with 
golden squares of light! We cannot do without our 
towers in New York, and our city would be pictorially 
the poorer if we could. May it not be that we have too 
long and too exclusively looked for the elements of 
beauty in what pleases the eye with symmetry or soothes 
it with conformity, and looked not enough in what 
rouses the eye to keener attention and through the eye 
reaches the centres of suggestion, kindling the imagina- 
tion? Certainly the value to the human spirit of a sight 
which wakes his faculties, which causes him to wonder, 
to speculate, to see beyond the immediate object, to 
think a thousand correlated thoughts, is as great as the 
sight which brings the familiar pleasure of "beauty," not 
as it is defined, for no two definitions are alike, but 
as it is generally understood and felt. Keats, enthusi- 
astically racing round the logical circle, said truth is 
beauty, beauty truth. But what is truth? Wherein does 
the truth of a Grecian urn consist, or of an ode upon it? 
Surely, the conquering charm of Keats' Ode, at any rate, 
lies in its recreation for the reader, not of the urn itself, 
but of that "little town by river or sea-shore" in the 
placid, crystalline atmosphere of the Greece of long ago, 
the Greece of glorifying fable. So, when our towering 
buildings pile up into ranges and bring to us the sense 
of canon-cleft and summit, of mass and depth, of Na- 
ture's own magnificence, who shall say they are not, for 
all their dumb unconsciousness, singing an ode in stone? 
What matters it how the result is achieved? The end is 
all, the effect upon the human soul. Why must we be 



A NEW ANSWER 11 

always viewing buildings as little habitations laid out on 
little plans to be looked at in conventional pattern? 
New York is too large, too strange, for that. It is the 
arch architectural insurgent. 

Why, indeed, may this same strangeness not be ad- 
mitted as a possible element even of conventional 
beauty? We long ago admitted it in literature, per- 
suaded by the Romanticists, by Whitman, by Ibsen, by 
all the great insurgent poets. Who now denies that "Peer 
Gynt" or "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed" 
is poetry? The critic of architecture may still call one of 
our skyscrapers ugly, as many critics have, considered 
apart from its setting and compared to Le Petit Trianon 
or Brunelleschi's Dome. But to this modern echo of 
the Edinburgh reviewers we reply that our skyscraper 
was never intended to produce the same effect as Bru- 
nelleschi's Dome, nor to serve the same purpose; and, 
furthermore, it is not in isolation that we view it. It was 
created to lift story upon story that space might be econ- 
omized, and the effect sought was vertical impressive- 
ness. We view it as one of the great crags in the walls 
of a man-made canon, and there it fills its place with 
admirable strength and uprightness. Certainly no such 
cliffs were ever before reared by Man; they seem less the 
work of Man, indeed, than of Nature, and at least we 
must grant to this mass effect the beauty of a natural 
wonder, if not of architectural symmetry. They are 
strange, these towering buildings; they rouse the senses 
like mountains, composing into Babylonic mass and fir- 
ing the imagination as only sheer height and size can do; 
over them the smoke plumes play, and through their 



12 



NEW YORK 



hazy canons the red rays of sunset shoot; and they are 
beautiful. Let us not quarrel longer with definitions, 
but go among the skyscrapers of lower Manhattan and 
enjoy. 




II 

AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS 




II 

AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS 

If you journey into the Berkshire Hills and climb Tom 
Ball Mountain, you will look down its steep western 
slope into a half wild intervale, with a few farm houses 
here and there like toys in their green clearings, and the 
farmer, like an ant, crawling in a pasture. At the base 
of the slope, almost under your feet, is an abandoned 
quarry. From this quarry came the stone to build the 
New York City Hall, exactly one century ago. You do 
not see it from the mountain top; Nature has covered its 
scar. But over the Alford intervale and the nearer hills 
you see along the horizon the blue wall of the Catskills, 
dome after dome like a procession of phantom drome- 



16 NEW YORK 

daries. The scene, probably, was not materially differ- 
ent in 1812, save for a greater quantity of evergreen tim- 
ber on the hill slopes, and a bit more bustle in the valley, 
where ox teams hauled the quarried stone away toward 
the Hudson River. 

But what a change the century has wrought in the 
scene about the building which this Berkshire marble 
built! The New York City Hall, possessing a certain 
delicate elegance combined with firmness and dignity 
— a type of that colonial architecture which was at its 
height in the early days of our republic and may still be 
seen on an extensive scale in Salem and Portsmouth 
and Newburyport — looked toward the Battery across a 
wedge-shaped green park, and its northward face was 
built of sandstone, since it seemed incredible that the 
town would pass by it to view it from the rear. Its tower, 
and the spires of the churches to the south, dominated 
the scene. Near by was the Park Theatre, and the masts 
of the shipping on the two river fronts were no doubt 
visible from its cupola. Now, no less delicately elegant 
but dingier, its marble yellowed by age like the files of 
an ancient newspaper, the City Hall sits like Truth at the 
bottom of a well, a well made by the lofty walls of the 
surrounding skyscrapers, its green park long since 
chopped in half, its graceful cupola dwarfed, its view 
restricted to the rear of the Post Office and a rift of sky. 
If you climb to the top of the new Woolworth Building 
tower on the corner of Broadway and Park Place, al- 
most eight hundred feet above the street level, you will 
look down upon this little edifice of a century ago from 
a height as great as the summit of Tom Ball Mountain 



AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS 17 

above the Alford quarry. Burrowing in mines, chiseling 
in quarries, forging in shops, the pigmy Man has 
emerged to build a mountain himself, whence he may 
view his handiwork of the past reduced to a marble toy, 
with Lilliputians like black ants running in and out of 
it, as small as the Alford farmer. 

Behind the City Hall, rearing up in gigantic mockery, 
yet with subtle flattery in its imitation, now stands the 
new municipal office building. It is as unlike the old 
Hall as the mountain cliff is unlike the pretty, fern cov- 
ered boulder at its base, yet it consciously reproduces, 
so far as a forty story skyscraper can, the colonial 
design, especially the cupola tower, and with its curving 
wings seems to embrace the elder structure and the 
green park at its feet, as some great head wall of a 
mountain cleft embraces the last oasis of verdure before 
the leap to snow line. Confronted by this strange con- 
trast of the centuries, the beholder pauses in silence, 
thinking, it may be, of the two types of life these two 
structures represent, regretting a little, it is quite pos- 
sible, the lost charm of a vanished day, but unable, none 
the less, to resist the tremendous impressiveness of that 
huge head wall, the more tremendous for the last oasis 
of verdure at its feet. Our architecture has left the val- 
ley. There is a different standard for the peak. Propor- 
tion, detail, suavity are left behind. Sheer bulk and 
upward sweep now take hold on our senses. The inter- 
est has shifted. Yet charm remains, more primitive, 
perhaps, and wilder — a curious paradox after a century 
of civilization and "progress"! 

Colour remains, also, or is added in greater abundance, 



18 NEW YORK 

and the lack of light and shadow which we deplore in the 
single building of modern steel construction is magnifi- 
cently supplied by the mass. Look down Broadway or 
Nassau Street, and see how a cornice lays a great oblique 
belt of dusky purple down the canon wall across the 
way, while farther on, facing the opening of a cross 
street, this same wall leaps at you with a dazzle of white. 
When the sun rises behind lower Manhattan the specta- 
tor on the River or the Jersey shore sees the cross streets 
as deep gulfs of molten gold, and each building, sharply 
outlined in the new-washed air, bears its steam plumes 
like salmon streamers high aloft, while every divergence 
of building material tells as an individual note of colour. 
The New York atmosphere, indeed, is sharp and unpol- 
luted by soft coal smoke much of the time, and from the 
gray street haze and the parti-coloured pedestrians, street 
cars, and shop windows, up along towering walls of red 
and white and brown and yellow to the gay flags and 
the slit of blue sky, the entire panorama of the Lower 
Town is spread in a thousand tints, with another thou- 
sand yet of transforming shadows. How many of us, 
none the less, see it drab, a sort of asphalt tone! It is 
surprising, indeed, to find how few New Yorkers are 
aware of the fact that our atmosphere is peculiarly 
sharp, bringing out sharp colours. When Sorolla, the 
Spanish painter, said the New York atmosphere was that 
of the Spanish coast in which he made his dazzling snap- 
shots of sun and skies and vivid costumes, we listened 
incredulous. We are even more incredulous when told 
that our town is rich in colour. Yet we have only to look 
upward, and the colour is there. From the North River 



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AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS 21 

ferries, for instance, we may see the green of the Rat- 
tery Park, the Indian red of the last sentinel skyscraper, 
the white of the West Street Ruilding with its aspiring 
lines and its flashing, sea-green roof, the red of the 
Singer Tower, the milky white of the City Investment 
Building next door, the gold of the "World" dome, the 
dusky browns and reds of ferry slips and the orange 
of freight houses by the water front, and over all the 
sun-tinted steam plumes and the clarion crimson of a 
hundred flags. 

Sir Martin Conway once suggested that the skyscraper 
frames should be walled by coloured tiles, arranged, 
perhaps, in formal patterns, to give the Lower Town a 
Babylonic magnificence. But we have all the colour now 
that is required for beauty, achieved in more seemly 
fashion. Necessity was the earthquake which upheaved 
these mortared ranges. They are frankly utilitarian and 
frankly they take their colour from the stone or brick 
that lay to the builder's hand. We would not have them 
otherwise. The skyscraper that tries to put on archi- 
tectural airs becomes grotesque; it is as if we met with 
formal gardens upon the uncompromising ledges of the 
Matterhorn. 

It is for such touches of grace and beauty as Nature 
may apply that we watch with endless delight, as we 
watch the shadow anchors of the clouds trail over the 
slopes of the Great Gulf on Mount Washington. The 
Lower Island from the Ray and rivers is a perpetual 
revelation. Here the herded buildings are grouped like 
a titanic fist of mountains. On foggy days the Singer 
Tower and its sister peaks go up out of sight into the 



22 NEW YORK 

vapours. Again, on days of heavy atmosphere and lower- 
ing rain, when the smoke from tugs and steamers hangs 
like a pall close to the water, I have seen the entire lower 
portions of the buildings obliterated, and only their 
summits reared on nothing into the gray air, a dream 
city, unbelievable, ethereal, immense. From the Jersey 
bank before sunrise the buildings are meaningless sil- 
houettes on a red sky, till suddenly the sun comes up, 
their cornices take fire, the cross streets are wells of 
molten gold, the third dimension springs into view, and 
we behold a town of Titans! When the early winter 
twilight comes, and the myriad window squares are all 
agleam, the city is again strangely converted. As the 
towering structures merge into the night and their out- 
lines vanish, upward rows of lights alone remain. Ris- 
ing so high, they converge in perspective, and from the 
deck of the ferry boat the lower city has exactly the 
aspect of a town of many streets running up a great, 
dome-like hill, each little house by the roadside imag- 
ined from its square of light. Indeed, the illusion is so 
powerful that you can almost see these houses! 

But most beautiful of all its aspects is its Japanese 
effect. That our great western metropolis should be 
converted into a Japanese screen is a curious thought. 
Yet you have only to go down the North River on a ferry 
boat some morning when the sun is shining through a 
slight sea haze to find the screen. The river is soft gray- 
green, with here and there a white cap like a flick of 
paint. The gulls flash. The upper sky is blue. And 
against this sky, over the soft water, the great, irregular 
wall of the Lower Town is painted in two dimensions 



AMONG THE SKYSCRAPERS 23 

only, a blue as beautiful as the sky, a gray as soft as the 
water. The haze has obliterated all solids, wiped out all 
angles. The flag on the Singer Tower whips out its one 
tiny trumpet blast of red. From Canal Street southward 
the design sweeps up into greater and greater bulk till 
the penultimate panel is reached. Then it falls suddenly 
away, and on the last section of the screen are only the 
dancing waters of the Bay and the smoke trail of an 
outgoing liner, whispering to the spirit of far adventur- 
ing. This is our Manhattan. Have we no artists to catch 
it so, and put it forever on a screen? Storks and cherry 
blossoms are lovely, too. But this is at once lovely and 
majestic — and our own. 

Seen from a distance, the human element in the Lower 
Town is slight, and the elder buildings on the water 
front are indistinguishably merged into the towering 
mass behind them. But as your ship or ferry draws in 
close, as details emerge, as each structure takes on a 
personal identity, you see the human bustle on ferry 
slip or pier, you catch the swarming procession of black 
ants down in the canons, and you note the old build- 
ings by the water front, low and comfortable, while be- 
hind them leaps up suddenly a great cliff wall, the 
rampart of the new city. On the East River, where Joe 
Cowell, sprightly comedian, landed in 1821, and ate his 
first meal of crackers and cheese in a "grocery shop" 
near the foot of Wall Street, little water front blocks 
remain as they were long ago, built of red brick, dingy, 
obscure, forgotten. One might almost hope still to find 
a grocery shop. Beyond and above them leap the 
bridges. Far overshadowing them tower the skyscrap- 



24 



NEW YORK 



ers. Like the City Hall, they are the reminders of an 
elder day. It is never wise to scorn our past, but here 
in lower New York it is inevitable that we should look 
down upon it. "The old order changeth," indeed. Now 
we mimic mountain ranges. But Nature, unchanging, 
gilds them with her morning lights, and in the heart of 
Man still plants the sense of wonder and of beauty, that 
he may find them fair. 




Ill 

THE BRIDGES 




Ill 

THE BRIDGES 

In the little village of North Reading, in the County of 
Middlesex, Massachusetts, my grandfather many years 
ago had a blacksmith shop. When it was proposed to 
build the Salem and Lowell Railroad, a one track system 
connecting the mill city with the seaport a score of miles 
distant, and passing through grandfather's meadows, 
the village wiseheads used to gather in his shop and sol- 
emnly debate whether the iron supply of the country 
would hold out to lay the rails. 

Presumably there is enough steel in the Queensboro' 
Bridge alone to double track the Salem and Lowell. 

Our great bridges are commonplace to us now. When 
the Brooklyn Bridge was opened in 1883 it attracted 



28 NEW YORK 

world-wide attention. But the opening of its most recent 
neighbour to the north a year or two ago caused not a 
ripple in the city's life. As Carlyle said, the second sun- 
rise ceases to be a wonder. The Brooklyn Bridge, how- 
ever, has not ceased to deserve the most attention, for it 
remains the most beautiful. This is in part due to the 
exquisite curve of its span, that peculiar curve which 
denotes infinity to the human imagination; and in part 
due to its suspension towers, which are graceful, solid 
pillars of masonry instead of the less gainly and some- 
times trellised props of steel-work which carry the 
newer structures. There is a sweep and spring and 
grace to the Brooklyn span which make it incomparable 
among all the bridges of the world — gigantic efficiency 
wedded to perfection of form. From all points and 
angles it is beautiful. As you come up the Bay, it springs 
from the flank of the city as if it were alive, and sweeps 
high across the busy river into the town on the other 
side. As you stand in old Franklin Square, by the house 
of Harper, you see its great stone arches striding far 
above the spot where George Washington lived as presi- 
dent. As you go under it on the deck of a Sound steamer, 
you catch it, as it were, in full flight. Your stacks seem 
about to collide with it. A moment later and you are 
underneath. There are fifty, a hundred feet to spare! 
The great thing leaps clear over you in unbroken flight 
from shore to shore, a boulevard in the air. And at night 
how beautiful it is, its towers almost indistinguishable, 
a golden film against the dark, with the glow-worms of 
the trains crawling perpetually back and forth spinning 
an incandescent web. 



THE BRIDGES 29 

Beyond the pioneer structure, within a quarter of a 
mile, comes the new Manhattan Bridge, no doubt more 
capacious, but no doubt less beautiful, for its towers are 
of steel instead of stone, and so less massive, and its 
curve a little less alluring, though still lovely. This bridge 
comes straddling over the Lower East Side tenements, 
and sweeps down into the Bowery at Canal Street, close 
to the old Thalia Theatre where Junius Brutus Booth 
and Edwin Forrest thundered. It has wiped out whole 
blocks of buildings on the final dip, as if reveling in its 
power. A mile farther up the East River, springing 
from the Island at a point where it pushes out an elbow, 
is the Williamsburg Bridge, also a suspension structure, 
with a longer span which has rather an awkward curve 
and therefore seems shorter. But from the Bowery, 
looking up a wide approach made by razing a half mile 
of tenements, the bridge becomes the great gateway of 
a boulevard, and the city about it seems planned on a 
mean and pigmy scale, awaiting the ampler imagination 
of the future. 

The Queensboro', or Blackwell's Island Bridge, which 
carries Fifty-ninth Street across the East River, is not 
a leaping span. It is a cantilever structure, a huge 
maze of steel, which straddles off the Manhattan cliffs 
to Blackwell's Island with a seven league boot stride, 
and then steps again to the Long Island shore, and seems 
to stretch over the lowlands to infinity. The top of this 
bridge is pinnacled like a Siamese palace, and it gains an 
added impressiveness from the old brick dwellings 
which sit on the cliff beside it, and the long, low struc- 
tures beneath it on Blackwell's Island. Some dark, omi- 



30 NEW YORK 

nous day when thunder threatens, stand upon the Man- 
hattan clifT, where Fifty-eighth Street ends in a quaint 
court of forgotten houses, the relics of a Pomander 
Walk. The river below you, narrowed in by Blackwell's 
Island, is a cruel, steely gray, and the white caps start up 
vividly. The barred prison buildings are distinct and 
forbidding on their long checkerboard of green. A 
steamer passes up stream, close in, the escape from her 
long-drawn whistle that startling white of a mountain 
birch against a thunder cloud. And straddling above 
you, a gigantic mass of steel, is the bridge, striding anew 
from the midstream island and vanishing into the oppo- 
site flats beneath the canopy of the coming storm, a 
thing huge as the rage of the lightning, and almost as 
uncompromising. 

We must follow a long way up the Island and turn 
westward through the Harlem waterway before we 
come to the next straddling structure, for the low draw- 
bridges which intervene, carrying railroads and high- 
ways and trolleys to the mainland, are the common- 
places of any city by a river. But as we enter the gorge 
of the Harlem where the sharp cliffs of Fort George and 
the northern nose of the Island hem it in, we see High 
Bridge suddenly walking against the sky, a centipede in 
stone. High Bridge is an ancient structure, as old in form 
as Imperial Rome, but not, like the aqueducts of Rome, a 
ruin. Were some of its arches shattered, were ivy and 
mosses clambering up its pillars and verdure clinging to 
its level top, it might be an engraving by Piranesi, with 
the Polo Grounds at One-hundred-and-fifty-fifth Street 
and the howling baseball "fans" for foreground, instead 



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THE BRIDGES 33 

of the feathery Campagna and a few Italian peasants. 
Yet there are compensations for the feathery Campagna 
even here, compensations of smoke plumes and steam 
jets, compensations of curving stream and high green 
banks and rushing trains over rails that glitter, compen- 
sations, especially, of ten thousand lights. High Bridge 
is a nocturne in black and gold when viewed from the 
bank just to the north, in the evening, so that it tells as a 
great silhouette against the dark, a silhouette of arches 
each framing some constellation of clustered lights 
along the river below, street lamps, ship lamps, locomo- 
tive headlights, all the illumination of the water front, 
with golden reflections rippling on the stream. The 
headlight comes thundering up the rails, drawing the 
golden glow-worm of the train. The red and green lights 
of a tug move up stream and a feathery mushroom of 
smoke is dimly visible. The lower edge of the sky is 
glowing with the reflection from the city. Along the 
level top of the bridge, lit with small lamps beside the 
walk, a few figures move in silhouette against the night 
sky. The great arches are Roman ghosts, yet strangely 
wedded to the present, doing their appointed work in a 
modern world of electricity. 

Indeed, this beautiful Roman structure striding the 
Harlem into New York was built for exactly the same 
purpose as the Roman aqueducts — which was, strange- 
ly enough, to carry water. It was not built to carry 
thousands of people, tons of teaming, trolley cars by 
the hundreds and elevated trains by the score. How 
ridiculous it is, after all, to reproach our bridges for not 
resembling the Ponte Vecchio, as we reproach our sky- 



34 NEW YORK 

scrapers for not being the Palazzo Uffizi. The first duty 
of a bridge is to get the required traffic across the stream. 
When your stream is a mile wide, and your traffic meas- 
ured by thousand-ton units, the architecture of your 
bridge will vary accordingly — or so much the worse for 
you. We delight to see the multiple tall stone arches of 
old High Bridge stalking like a Roman ghost beyond the 
Polo Grounds, or stepping easily over the Empire State 
Express. They are equal to the task they have to per- 
form, and perform it with classic dignity. But unless 
we scorn the task that great semi-circumference of steel 
holding up a level boulevard a half mile beyond has to 
perform, we cannot scorn this new architecture of steel, 
this web of brace and counter brace that leaps in single 
span from shore to shore and has the equally precious 
beauty of power and efficiency. 

No bridges leap from the mortared flanks of our 
Island on its western side, perhaps because the Hudson 
is too wide, perhaps because the traffic does not demand 
it, perhaps because the recent subaqueous tunnels have 
made further bridges unnecessary. The "tubes" are not 
pictorial, but they put the traffic out of the streets and 
handle it speedily and on schedule, great express trains 
rolling away for Chicago and New Orleans beneath our 
houses and the Hudson; and they leave unobstructed the 
panorama of the river, southward holding tugs and 
lighters and ferry boats and liners on its ample flood as 
it drops down past the steel Sierras to the sea, northward 
washing the still wooded end of Manhattan Island and 
vanishing, a great blue pathway, into the haze, with 
purple nose after purple nose of the Palisades pushing 



THE BRIDGES 35 

boldly into it, till they, too, have melted into distance. 
There is more sense of the sea on this side of Manhat- 
tan, and more realization that we dwell on an island. 
The busy ferry boats, scooting hither and thither like 
water bugs on a pool, and bringing each its hundreds of 
little black' ant people, give us this island sense; and it 
is on the western side, particularly, that we realize New 
York as an ocean port, that we see men going down to 
the sea in ships. 

In Marblehead or Gloucester you are aware of the sea 
on every street. You catch the glint of water down 
every vista, you smell it, the stores proclaim it and 
the passers-by. But on Wall Street or Fifth Avenue or 
Broadway the nautical atmosphere is not apparent — 
and that is as much of our city as many of us often 
know! But follow down the North River-front from 
Forty-second Street to the Battery, and you will catch 
the seaport flavour. You will behold such heaps and bales 
of cargo as you never dreamed, hauled by a wilderness 
of drays, and great docks walled like the imperial city 
of Pekin, and the towering bows of liners nosing up to 
the very street, and the four great funnels of the Maure- 
tania like monuments above the roofs. 

Be it bridges or shipping that connect our Island with 
the neighbouring mainland or with distant continents, 
colossal size and a new efficiency mark them — the effi- 
ciency of steel. Steel made the Woolworth Tower and 
the Queensboro' bridge and the tubes beneath the riv- 
ers and the Mauretania. Each one complements and 
completes the other, and their beauty must be judged by 
their fitness and efficiency. The first steamboat, the 



36 



NEW YORK 



first locomotive, was ugly, because it was not efficient. 
Today the giant liners are superb, seeming almost con- 
scious themselves of their conquering lines; and the 
great moguls that haul our fliers pant like beautiful live 
things at a water tank. They have found their type at 
last, and are supremely admirable. So the bridges which 
handle with the greatest ease the greatest traffic, which 
fling the longest spans from the flanks of the tallest city, 
will ultimately be judged by their efficiency. They have 
risen to meet a new condition, on a new continent, born 
of the dreams of a new nation. Why should they not 
possess a new beauty? To the eye which sees New York 
steadily and sees it whole, they do. 




IV 
THE OLD TOWN 




IV 
THE OLD TOWN 

During the opening years of the Twentieth Century 
I used to talk with an old gentleman who loved to muse 
on the days that are no more, the days when his family 
had a country place near the North River docks at Thir- 
teenth Street and the mail came twice a day by stage 
from New York, and when, as a boy, he went out with 



40 NEW YORK 

his first gun into the woods where the old Seventh Regi- 
ment Armory later stood, close by the Cooper Union at 
the head of the Bowery, and shot a quail! Since then the 
city has gone roaring northward, mile on mile of solid 
masonry, far beyond these precincts. It strikes one 
today as ludicrously incredible that quail could have 
nested at Astor Place within the memory of a living 
man. What a boom town New York has been — and still 
is! It sweeps on perpetually, eating up fields and coun- 
try, and looking perpetually in process, perpetually of 
tomorrow rather than yesterday or even today. Yet it 
has left its oases of at least comparative antiquity. Like 
most boom towns, it has skipped perversely certain 
spots in its endless process of tearing down and building 
bigger. In those spots we love to linger, for their quiet, 
for their sense of other days, for the perspective they 
afford us on our larger and livelier present. 

Trinity Parish is responsible for several of them, for 
Trinity Church itself at the head of Wall Street, and old 
St. Paul's turning its back on Broadway, and St. John's 
northwestward on Varick Street, in a neglected and for- 
gotten part of town, where it maintains a precarious 
existence, periodically threatened with demolition, with 
the "Evening Post" and the "Churchman" periodically 
rushing to its rescue. Its beautiful Wren spire rises grace- 
fully above its Grecian portico, and it is flanked in front 
by two buildings worthy of it, the old Trinity Rectory 
and the Parish House. Up and down the street, however, 
the gracious dwellings are no more, only tenements and 
warehouses, and the park is no more it used to face. 
From the rear, you catch a view of it as you come down 



THE OLD TOWN 41 

town on the Elevated — a brown wall, the bare semicircu- 
lar apse rising behind the wall, and the slender spire, 
framed between tenement fire escapes and variegated 
disclosures of domestic wearing apparel. Some day 
even the "Evening Post" will not avail to save it, and a 
towering warehouse will take its place. But we shall be 
the poorer without the glimpse of its ancient loveliness. 
A little farther north, where the numbered streets 
commence — where New York began to be "laid out," in 
other words — is Washington Square. Here poverty and 
aristocracy face each other across a green park and a 
fountain, and a University jostles a sweat-shop on the 
east. Yet the Square has its own unity of impression, and 
nowhere in the great town, perhaps, is the spring more 
vernal, the sense of ordered charm stronger, the feeling 
more pronounced that here, at least, is a spot which 
has found itself, which has been finished and had time 
to grow a bit of ivy. Thanks to the fact that the Sailors' 
Snug Harbor, which owns almost the entire northern 
face of the Square, has more income now than it knows 
what to do with, that incomparable row of simple, digni- 
fied, substantial red brick dwellings retains its unity of 
sky line and marble porticos, keeping the sense of or- 
dered, cheerful domesticity which belongs by right to a 
homogeneous society. The skyscraper is a thing of com- 
merce. It can never be reconciled to a right system of 
domestic life. Washington Square and lower Fifth Ave- 
nue beyond are the reproach of an elder and more beau- 
tiful way of living to our present generation of cliff- 
dwellers. How serenely these cheerful homes, conscious 
of their loveliness, look southward over the green 



42 NEW YORK 

Square, and see the hosts of children play and the foun- 
tain like an opal ringed with the gold of tulips, and un- 
der the aged elms and the marble arch the green 'busses 
bearing flower gardens up and down — the gay hats of 
the passengers! Under that solemn Roman arch the 
Avenue begins, its misty vista framed by the marble 
blocks, the gay flags on the old Hotel Brevoort whipping 
out over a bit of green foliage; and looking southward 
again, through the arch, you may see, as twilight steals 
into the Square from the east and the sunset dies over 
the far hills of Hoboken, the cross on the Judson Tower 
twinkle into gold, keeping guard above the elms and the 
children and the teeming tenements below, from the 
same slender watch-tower that dreamed long ago above 
the plains of Lombardy. 

Behind the houses on the north of the Square, and 
west of the Avenue, is a quaint little court bearing the 
unromantic name of Macdougal Alley. It was once lined 
on both sides with stables; one or two of them, indeed, 
still house motor cars. But most of these stables have 
been converted into studios, and Macdougal Alley is 
now, perhaps, our nearest approach to a Latin Quarter; 
at any rate, it is our one spot where all the inhabitants 
live apart in a world of idealistic creation, and let the 
town flow by them unrecked. There are both sculptors 
and painters on the Alley. The open door of an appar- 
ent stable shows a glimpse within of white-clad Ital- 
ians "pointing up" a model into marble, or a sculptor 
walking 'round and 'round a mould of clay, or a head 
bent intently toward an easel, and the flash of a hand 
and brush. Here in the quiet Alley the artists' children 



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THE OLD TOWN 45 

play unmolested, and a cat walks sedately up and down. 
The way ends against a fence. Over the fence nod trees. 
From either side the windows of aristocratic brick houses 
look down. The noise of the city is curiously hushed. 
It is an ideal spot for ideal pursuits, hidden in back yards 
amid the simplicity of stables. 

Westward from Washington Square lies Greenwich 
Village, its crooked streets mute witness to the days al- 
most a century ago when it was hastily settled by refu- 
gees from plague-stricken New York. The crooked 
streets of Boston are attributed to the ambulatory in- 
stincts of Mr. Blackstone's cows, those of Greenwich Vil- 
lage to the fact that the original house lots were taken up 
along the lanes and short cuts of a country hamlet. If 
you enter it on Fourth Street you will presently end up in 
Twelfth. If you enter it by Eleventh or Twelfth Street, 
you will pass between two blocks of pleasant red brick 
dwellings, with trees in front — that rarest of sights in our 
arid city — and here and there an ancient church with a 
Doric portico or a group of houses with triple rows of 
balconies across them, the wrought grillwork, ivy cov- 
ered, suggesting a southern country. Wealth still inhabits 
these cross streets well into Greenwich, and even after 
you have passed under the Sixth Avenue Elevated struc- 
ture the low, pleasant dwellings have few of the airs of 
a slum. Was our entire city once like this? Did we live 
in separate houses, with mottled shadows on our curb? 
We pass cheery little dwellings by a small park (in one 
of them Robert Blum lived and painted), and pass down 
crooked Grove Street, with here and there a six story 
tenement breaking the line of ancient red brick homes. 



46 NEW YORK 

Presently, between two of these dwellings, appears a 
narrow opening. We slip through. Can this be New 
York, the New York we know? We are in a tiny, brick- 
paved court, surrounded by ramshackle, brick houses. 
In the centre of the court is a pump, the bricks green 
with moss beneath its spout. Lift the handle, and the 
water gushes. Out of that doorway a ragged child is 
coming with a pail. There is no hint here of the roar of 
traffic on distant Broadway. There is no sight of a sky- 
scraper. We have slipped back through that narrow 
gap behind us into a New York of fifty years ago. Only, 
we might add, we do not hazard a drink of the water. 
Pasteur has done his work since 1850! 

Northward from Greenwich Village, separated in the 
old days by farms and fields, lay Chelsea, both seeking 
proximity to the cool breezes of the North River, and 
both, for that reason, passed by when the town marched 
up the centre of the Island. There is a row of houses on 
West Twenty-third Street, the Portland Terrace, which 
still boasts front yards, and behind it a block of West 
Twenty-fourth Street is like a glimpse of some south- 
ern town, low, sunny, and sleepily cheerful. But the 
heart of old Chelsea is the block bounded by Ninth 
and Tenth Avenues and Twenty-first and Twenty-sec- 
ond Streets. The centre of this block is filled by the 
General Theological Seminary, with the old retaining 
wall of the Hudson still visible at its western end. The 
cross streets present two rows of well-weathered houses, 
still occupied as homes of comfort, although that in 
which a professor of Hebrew — of all people! — wrote 
"The Night Before Christmas" has been replaced by a 



THE OLD TOWN 47 

"flat." A scholastic atmosphere still broods over this 
oasis, the stranger for the teeming commerce on the 
river and the teeming tenements to the east. The various 
buildings of the Seminary leave no strong architectural 
impression, yet they are academic and ivy-grown, with 
the mellow charm of age and association, while beneath 
their walls move figures in scholastic mortarboard and 
gown, to the call of a vesper bell. 

Doubtless unfairly, but inevitably, one thinks of the 
river commerce and the teeming desert of town which 
hem this academic oasis, and seeks a symbol of the de- 
cay of faith in the startling contrast. Here reclused stu- 
dents pore over Pusey and the Hebrew prophets, while 
tugs toot on the restless river and the Elevated thunders. 
One enters the gate, and leaves the noise and rattle 
behind. A youth sits at an open window of a dormitory, 
reading a book. A group in mortarboards and gowns 
pass to a recitation. A sober professor, absorbed with 
the traditional absent-mindedness in thought, crosses 
from his house. The eye rests on an ancient brick wall 
covered with delicate ivy. Presently there steals over 
the senses the croon of an organ. The last sound of the 
outer world dies as you enter the chapel. The fresh 
voices of the choir, the drone of the service, the bowed 
heads of the young soldiers of an ancient faith, the low 
light of afternoon strained through tinted glass, are all 
the sounds or sights that reach your senses. Here the 
old order changeth not. How restful to the spirit is this 
solidity, like "the shadow of a great rock in a weary 
land"! Yet these young soldiers must go forth into the 
modern world, into those teeming tenements, into the 



48 



NEW YORK 



marts of commerce, to bear a new hope for an ancient 
longing. Old Chelsea deserves to keep its charm of brick 
and ivy only so long as it sends forth soldiers whose 
message does bring hope to the modern world; and that 
message will not come from weathered stones but the 
hearts of men. Perhaps we must find in the end that 
our oases of antiquity are not symbols, after all, but 
only accidents that please the eye. Yet for some of us, 
to please the eye is no slight service. So, like most mus- 
ings, this one ends with a paradox. 




V 
THE SQUARES 




THE SQUARES 

In no part of New York, perhaps, is the need for a re- 
adjustment of the vision so apparent as in our two fa- 
mous squares, Union and Madison, strung on the artery 
of Broadway. Viewed from the water, the Lower Island 
rises at the end of a mile, like a natural phenomenon — 
a serried cliff, or mountain range — and necessitates no 
neck craning. Viewed from its streets, all the lines go 



52 NEW YORK 

up as in a forest. But viewing the skyscrapers about 
Union and Madison Squares, we are at once far enough 
removed and close enough to sense the natural habit of 
the eye to view its surroundings in horizontal perspec- 
tive and to feel the new tug fighting this habit and carry- 
ing the eye straight aloft. Traditionally, a square exists 
lo make a pleasing ground pattern and to frame, in ho- 
rizontal perspective, the surrounding examples of ar- 
chitecture. Such a purpose both Union and Madison 
Squares served until the last decade. Now, almost in a 
night, the ground pattern and horizontal perspective are 
battling for attention against the new call of the upward 
sight line. Squares ten times the present acreage would 
be required to frame the new buildings in level vista 
and preserve the impression of ground pattern. So we 
have, in our squares, yet another startling contrast — a 
suggestion at once of level country and shooting towers; 
and Fourth Avenue, where once the old Everett House 
stood at the head of Union Square, has now become a 
mighty canon ending abruptly on a plain. 

You may like this or not, but you cannot avoid it. For 
better or worse, the majority of our streets and squares 
are as wide as they can ever be, and while it is conceiv- 
able that a twenty story city with streets and squares of 
corresponding width would retain the old effect of hori- 
zontal vision while gaining the new effect of massive 
height and size, and while we may sigh that ours ought to 
be that city, we still shall have to make the most of what 
we possess and, at the feet of our towers, rest our eyes 
on what green we may before the leap. Saint-Gaudens' 
alert and breeze-blown Farragut in Madison Square is 



THE SQUARES 53 

indubitably less impressive at the bottom of a well, 
while the three hundred foot prow of the Flatiron Build- 
ing bears down upon it, with half Broadway in tow; and 
the lithe-limbed Diana on her Spanish-Moorish-Italian 
tower now shoots her shafts into office windows but half 
way up the commercialized Campanile close by. Sculp- 
ture belongs to the horizontal vision and the intimacy of 
ground plan. Yet there is compensation. Look where 
that same great prow of the Flatiron catches the sunset 
rose upon its western side, and over the haze of the city 
seems almost to lift its sharp nose forward! How grace- 
ful it is in its strength! And the commercialized Cam- 
panile, too, is rosy with the western radiance, flashing 
down the sunset farewell from its lifted lantern, while 
in the Square beneath already twilight has spread a veil 
of blue and the arc lamps splutter. 

We used to shop in Union Square, lingering over the 
latest books or passing between cases aglitter with jew- 
els. Now the shops have joined the march uptown, and 
wholesale houses have taken their places. The roll of 
carriages has ceased. On the southern side little moving 
picture theatres advertise their cheap and insignificant 
wares with a mighty display of electricity, and on a 
misty, wet night when the asphalt is a mirror their 
facades make a picture no film within could rival. To 
the east, the shabby row of old-time buildings shows a 
face of sleepy decay. It is on the west and north, espe- 
cially on the corner where Fourth Avenue makes its 
exit, that the modern town displays itself in rearing 
walls, dwarfing the trees and pansy beds and massing 
blocks of shadow with perpetual variety. Looking up 



54 NEW YORK 

through the dusty green trees into the canon slit of 
Fourth Avenue, you see the walls of the two buildings 
which form the entrance pillars, startlingly white. But 
back into the gorge the mortared cliffs throw shadows 
one upon the other in great patterns of gray and blue 
and purple, and the vista finally melts into a dark, dusty 
haze suggestive of infinite distance. Meanwhile, far 
above the roofs, the white Metropolitan Tower to the 
north stands up and takes the sun. 

Always that tower, in this part of town, crowns the 
distance. If we go two long blocks to the east, into Stuy- 
vesant Square, where time-crusted dwellings still stand 
about and the old Quaker Meeting House quaintly re- 
minds you by its plain red brick walls of New England 
Andover, and the stunted spires of St. George's Church 
look down on the swarms of tenement children at play, 
still you may see above meeting house and spires the 
white shaft with its golden lantern. Come back now 
through Irving Place, where the ancient, peaceful houses 
are fast giving way to ugly loft buildings, to Gram- 
ercy Park, most exclusive of all our squares, since its 
pretty green garden is fenced about and only the sur- 
rounding householders have the key. Some attempt at 
real gardening is possible here. A few tall apartment 
houses have broken the sky line, but many of the older 
dwellings remain, some with swell fronts and window 
panes turning a faint purple in hopeless rivalry with 
Beacon Hill, and look benignly over the railing into the 
flower beds and fountain. The flags of half a dozen 
clubs whip out over Gramercy Park; cabs stand in front; 
liveried servants appear at the doors. A group of 



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THE SQUARES 57 

immaculate children, under the watchful eye of a nurse- 
maid, play about the fountain. Your steps loiter uncon- 
sciously. This is not New York, after all. This must be 
a nook of old London or a backwater of aristocratic Bos- 
ton. Then you lift your eyes, and nearer now, more in- 
sistent, the commercialized Campanile booms up over 
the housetops half way to the zenith! 

When the Fifth Avenue Hotel was erected in Madison 
Square, a few years before the Civil War, the owner was 
dubbed a fool for building so far north. Now, fifty 
years later, the hotel has been torn down because it was 
too far south. A huge office building has taken its place. 
The towering Flatiron Building hauls Broadway and 
Fifth Avenue into the Square at one end. At the other, 
where until recently a row of Victorian brown stone 
dwellings proclaimed the aristocratic days of Miss Flora 
McFlimsey, a broken line of skyscrapers makes at twi- 
light a mighty screen of blue shadow. On the east Diana 
springs from her yellow tower at one corner, and the 
titanic marble Campanile bears its golden lantern seven 
hundred feet aloft at the other, taking poor Diana down 
a peg, to be sure, but unable quite to obscure her. Be- 
tween these two towers are yet others now, narrow 
buildings, either on the Square or on Fourth Avenue 
behind, piling up in a confusion of masonry that is, 
architecturally, mere upright line and window, while 
tucked away at their feet are the low, classic piles of the 
Court House and the Madison Square Presbyterian 
Church — marble statues and Delia Robbia pediment 
carved at the foot of a mountain range. 

There is still shopping around Madison Square, and 



58 NEW YORK 

the roll of carriages and limousines. The human throng 
is animated, gay. The open space is wide enough to 
admit the sun. A fountain pulses under the trees and 
men and women loiter along the walks or chat on the 
benches. Under the trees, indeed, their foliage discour- 
aging the upward view, the Square still has something 
of its old-time aspect. You look out upon the roll of 
pleasure traffic, upon the breeze-blown Farragut, upon 
the pillars of the church, upon the white statues on the 
Court House, upon the arches and tower of the Garden. 
But always behind the church, above the throng, you 
sense a wall, and coming to an opening you lift your 
eyes to see the great Campanile heaving aloft, or the 
range on range of skyscrapers piling into the north, or 
the beautiful prow of the Flatiron bearing down upon 
you. 

There are bright winter days, too, when Madison 
Square is peculiarly attractive, just after a new fall of 
snow in the night. Men have already begun to heap the 
white snow up into conical piles on the asphalt before 
you are abroad. These piles are like Eskimo igloos, 
with incongruous motors dodging between them. Pres- 
ently along comes a man who thrusts bright red and 
yellow placards upon the top of each pile, advising us to 
attend the latest musical comedy. A little sun, and 
the piles melt down a trifle, so that the placards begin to 
tilt at a hundred groggy angles. The trees in the park 
space are coated with snow, the black under side of each 
limb and branch telling sharply beneath its white jacket. 
How beautiful a bare branch becomes when its line is 
thus accentuated! Is anything more difficult to render 



THE SQUARES 59 

with a pencil or brush than the vital spring of a lateral 
branch, maintaining through a score of irregularities, 
even of sharp angles, the rhythm of its growth? A tree 
in winter, denuded of foliage, is stark and noble; but 
when it is coated with snow in the sunlight it becomes 
once more a thing of infinite grace and lightness, its 
tracery no less pleasantly contrasted here in the Square 
with the bounding walls of the tall buildings, than its 
leafy green in summer. When the winter evening comes 
the igloos gleam coldly under the arc lamps, but under 
the trees some boys have made a black, icy slide on the 
walk, and are flying along it with merry shouts. And 
once in the year, at Christmas time, a great Norway 
spruce sprouts with coloured lights and glittering tinsel 
beside the icy fountain, while the plaintive melody of 
ancient carols mingles with the city's roar. 

There are lowering days of mist and rain when the 
Campanile goes up out of sight into the driving vapours, 
and you wonder if the occupants of those offices on the 
top stories feel the chill of the clouds. There are misty 
evenings when the sky-borne lantern, without any vis- 
ible support, gleams like a great star in the sky. But the 
tower, and the whole Square, are most beautiful at the 
hour when the blue veil of twilight drops over the city, 
softening outlines, wiping out shadows, obliterating de- 
tails. Then the surrounding skyscrapers are flats of 
blue, stood on end, like a beautifully tinted screen placed 
about this oasis of green park and home-going hu- 
mans. Then the arc lamps splutter out, the trolley cars 
are golden, the illuminated clock half way up the Cam- 
panile beams like a benignant moon, the Flatiron is a 



60 



NEW YORK 



phantom ship, and only the white marble pyramid of 
the great tower far aloft is tipped with the warm rose 
of sunset, echoing that last red banner of the defeated 
day which may still be glimpsed down a side street, over 
the Hoboken heights. At that twilight hour the Square 
is its old self, intimate, human, but new-set amid blue 
mountain cliffs and under a mighty watch-tower. There 
is the little human plan and planting; there the heights 
and spaces of primeval Nature against the evening sky. 
To stand in Madison Square at twilight is to think New 
York one of the most beautiful cities in the world. 




VI 
FIFTH AVENUE 




VI 
FIFTH AVENUE 

If you walk up Fifth Avenue from Washington Square 
to Harlem you see much of New York in epitome, both 
the various phases of its evolution and the multitudi- 
nous aspects of its present. Here domesticity has made 
stand after stand against the encroachments of com- 
merce—and been worsted; each battle leaving its mark 
in dwellings converted to trade. Here church spires 
jostle with skyscrapers, here are the finest shops, here 
the most nearly incessant roll of pleasure traffic, here 
alike the canon slit and the bordering greenery of trees 
and park. The Avenue begins at the Washington Arch 
and for six blocks maintains, save for a skyscraper or 
two of recent construction, the pleasant aspect of an 



64 NEW YORK 

elder day, flanked by fine old houses, an old hotel gay 
with white paint and green shutters, two brown stone 
churches with excellent English Gothic spires as yet un- 
dwarfed, and down orderly side streets the shade of 
trees. Then Fourteenth Street cuts across, like a Mason 
and Dixon line to mark commercial slavery. Suddenly 
Fifth Avenue is the bottom of a canon. The sunlight has 
disappeared from the pavement, the red brick dwellings 
are no more. The canon walls tower twenty stories on 
either hand, and the walks swarm at the noon hour with 
the outpouring of garment workers from the lofts. They 
are the commercial slaves, undersized, coarse featured, 
pathetic, jabbering in many tongues with Yiddish pre- 
dominating, and making the curbs almost impassable. 
Again at night they pour out and through the cross streets 
eastward to their tenement homes, the great immigrant 
army that makes our underwear and our disease, while 
we make money. In spite of the shadows that mass 
in the canon depths, this part of the walk up the Ave- 
nue is not pleasant. We come with relief into Madi- 
son Square, and greet the great white tower and the 
trees. 

Beyond the Square begins a stretch where the shops 
have triumphed completely over the aristocratic dwell- 
ings, tearing down some to replace them with tall build- 
ings, converting others into four stories of show win- 
dows where the pillage of the world invites a purchaser. 
There is a charm about these small shops made out of 
dwellings, which no modern department store can ever 
rival, and there is a richness and rareness in the goods 
displayed which suggest a collection rather than a stock 



FIFTH AVENUE 65 

in trade, intimate and inviting you to browse. Here are 
neckties of a liquid loveliness calling to the male, and 
mysteries of white calling to his mate. Here are etch- 
ings by Whistler and Haden and Cameron, and vases of 
the Ming Dynasty and chairs from some ancient French 
chateau and screens from Japan, where silken rivers 
run through forests of bamboo while on the pebbled 
window floor in front ivory elephants march amid aged 
pine trees half a foot high. Wealth does its shoppings 
here, and wealth rolls by in its limousines and even con- 
descends to walk a bit at the luncheon hour. 

The shopping section is at its height, and the view of 
the Avenue perhaps at its best, on the crest of Murray 
Hill. Here the beautiful Gorham building, with its 
bronze cornice, is close by you, one of the most success- 
ful adaptations yet made of the tall steel frame to a new 
type of individual beauty. It has the sheer climb of 
wall yet it remains a solid, it carries ornamental sculp- 
ture (in relief) without making the ornament picayune, 
and there is about it a certain gray, elegant, rich simplic- 
ity which few New York buildings, new or old, possess. 
Look southward now. The white walls of Altman's store 
reflect the afternoon sun. The great, towering red cliff 
of the Waldorf-Astoria, its windows like a myriad swal- 
lows' nests in a Georgia river bank, casts a mass of 
shadow over the Thirty-fourth Street corner. Down the 
Avenue hangs a haze, pierced at intervals by the sun's 
rays shot through cross streets or between tall buildings. 
The skyscrapers, irregularly placed, are a procession of 
towers. Flags whip out into the sun, bright flecks of 
crimson. Far off, at the end of the vista, the haze is 



66 NEW YORK 

brightened by the open space of Madison Square, and 
closing the view the prow of the Flatiron stands up and 
takes the sun. Now your eye drops to the street level, 
and you are aware of the endless roll of carriages and 
motors, the endless crawl of pedestrians, a black river 
moving through with flowers floating on its surface. At 
four or five o'clock of a bright autumn afternoon this 
river fills every inch of space, and to watch it dam up 
at the command of a traffic policeman, then break again 
and flow down Murray Hill into the southern haze, is 
to feel at once the vastness and the lure and the loneli- 
ness of New York. 

Just beyond, between Fortieth and Forty-second 
Streets, is the new Public Library, a massive design in 
marble. With the vexed question of the architectural 
success of this pile let us not wrestle. It is set, of neces- 
sity, close to the Avenue, so that it must be viewed 
obliquely, and many complain that the central portico, 
by being thrust twenty feet forward, cuts the design in 
half. Perhaps half a design is better than none, when it 
speaks in marble of the classic days, beside our modern 
thoroughfare. The portal is guarded by two recumbent 
lions, which have assumed a curious expression of philo- 
sophic mirth, not untinged with irony, at the human 
procession. Stand on the broad stone platform behind 
them, and you will view against the shop windows oppo- 
site an endless stream of hats and faces, chauffeurs' 
heads, lapdogs peering from limousines, perspiring dray 
horses, a green 'bus, more hats, more faces, till the eyes 
close for very dizziness. 

Beyond Forty-second Street, the war between com- 



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FIFTH AVENUE 69 

merce and domesticity is still being waged, with domes- 
ticity losing ground all the way to the Plaza. Here are 
more churches, here side streets of endless brown stone 
stoops, here the Roman Catholic Cathedral with its slen- 
der twin spires, here the richest art shops, where "old 
masters" (some of them really are) look out upon the 
Avenue where he who runs may see — a museum vis- 
ited without interrupting your drive! — and here what 
remains of "Millionaires' Row," that collection of French 
chateaux and brown stone palaces which our wealthiest 
families built for homes but a generation ago, and al- 
ready are being forced to abandon. Then the Plaza! 

The Plaza comes upon you with a jump. It is the 
sudden apex of the Avenue. To your left is the largest 
of all the chateaux, a dwelling that fills a block. To your 
right are two tall hotels. Before you is the open square, 
at one side the towering white cliff wall of the Plaza 
Hotel, beyond it the green woodland of Central Park, and 
riding triumphantly down into its centre to meet you, 
Saint-Gaudens' golden bronze of General Sherman. Here 
is one piece of statuary even so huge a skyscraper as the 
Plaza Hotel does not dwarf. The gilded bronze justifies 
its colour if only by its power to catch the sunlight and 
focus the attention. A wrist of steel holds taut the bridle. 
The horse is crowding Victory off the pedestal by his 
superb forward urge. "It was like General Sherman to 
make a woman walk!" exclaimed the little old lady from 
the South, whose acid memories when she saw this statue 
rose superior to her aesthetic sense. But the world will 
soon enough forget those bitternesses, some saner Park 
Commission will remove the little trees which have been 



70 NEW YORK 

planted in a ring about the pedestal, and this rider of 
golden bronze will forever march in triumph down the 
Avenue, fit symbol of the human will in war, beneath 
the shadow of a lofty building that is a fit symbol of the 
human will at its achievements of peace. 

Now the Avenue is bright with trees, for the Park 
flanks it for almost three miles on the west, and domes- 
ticity to the east at last holds undisputed sway, dwelling 
after dwelling of every conceivable design, yet all be- 
speaking a certain unity of wealth. Here let us strike off 
into Central Park, and view the Avenue from afar. 

You cannot know Central Park in a day nor a week. 
Its splendid area of eight hundred and forty-three acres, 
naturally wild and rocky, and laid out according to Na- 
ture's contours into lakes and walks and lawns and 
groves in the heart of a great city, holds many a trea- 
sured nook and vista which only patient research will 
disclose. The happy combination of artlessness in the 
Park with the formality of surrounding architecture is 
one of its greatest charms. The Plaza looks at its own 
reflection in a forest pool; under a pine branch like a 
Japanese picture, and over a snowy lawn, we see the 
facade of the Century Theatre; in spring we look down 
a green slope to a lake, and over the lake to a wall, and 
beyond the wall flows the gay traffic on the Avenue, 
while the golden dome of the Synagogue is mirrored in 
the water. At night the Park is a dim mystery under 
the moon, and the great apartment houses to the west a 
procession of ghostly liners going by, their port-hole 
lights agleam. From the Belvidere tower we look out 
over the Reservoir, seeing nothing but the gold-rippled 



FIFTH AVENUE 71 

water and the distant trees — a lake in the wilderness. 
Yet a few steps through the trees, and the Casino blazes 
gaily, with motors purring up and under the table lamps 
the shimmer of glass and china and the faces of men 
and women. In winter the large lake almost under the 
shadow of the western apartment wall is a gay country 
scene, whitened almost to snow by the grind of ten thou- 
sand skates and alive with the swaying, darting, inter- 
lacing black swarm of the skaters. In summer, boats 
ply its surface, the sound of a band drifts over the beds 
of pansies and cannas, and on the eastern side of the 
Park, under the wall of Fifth Avenue at Sixty-sixth 
Street, a group of little old men silently and mysteri- 
ously play croquet beneath the trees, on turf that is for- 
bidden to the ordinary tread. No more silently, no more 
mysteriously, did the little old men in the Catskills play 
at bowls before the astonished eyes of Rip Van Winkle. 
Who are they? Whence come they? Perhaps they are 
ghosts of the old New York. They ought to have multi- 
ple breeches and Dutch names. The lions roar in the Zoo 
just south. The traffic rumbles in the Avenue almost 
above their bent backs. The nursemaids and children, 
the boys intent on nameless pursuits, pass by them on 
the walk. Yet still they drive their wooden spheres 
through the arches, click, click, click — silent, mysteri- 
ous, absorbed. On such a quaint, unworldly backwater 
of life does the great modern Avenue look down, as it 
marches northward past the Park, rising over a hill, dip- 
ping into a hollow, flanked by the home of our most 
publicly benevolent multi-millionaire and scores of his 
less exploited fellows, and finally ignominiously enter- 



72 



NEW YORK 



ing Harlem, where the green Park is left behind, and 
block on block of sardine apartment houses succeed. 
Let us leave Fifth Avenue in Harlem, to work out as best 
it may the new destiny of a civilization that needs must 
live in layers. The Avenue begins in the past, and ends 
in the future — which thing is a symbol. 




VII 
BROADWAY 




VII 
BROADWAY 

If Fifth Avenue begins in the past and ends in the fu- 
ture, Broadway begins in the strident present and ends 
in Albany. But we must preserve the municipal ameni- 
ties, and confine ourselves to Manhattan Island, on 
which Broadway is as the central vein of a long leaf. 
From the Battery northward beyond the City Hall, of 
course, Broadway is our deepest canon. Thence it dips 
down the hill to the ancient canal and runs straight be- 
tween tall lofts and wholesale houses to the gray Gothic 
pile of Grace Church, where it bends accommodatingly 



76 NEW YORK 

to frame that slender spire at the end of the vista, enters 
Union Square, then Madison Square, and changes com- 
pletely its character. From Madison Square, or a little 
north, almost to Central Park now, it is a street apart, it 
is the Gay White Way, the home of theatres and frivol- 
ity, the highroad through Vanity Fair. 

"Broadway," indeed, now becomes less the name of a 
street than of a district and a peculiar society. The dis- 
trict is spreading down side streets to left and right. 
Almost daily some group of old brown stone dwellings 
is torn down to make way for a theatre or a restaurant 
or an office building where soon the myriad applicants 
for theatrical employment will crowd the elevators. The 
new building will rise from a deep excavation, strad- 
dling black frames of steel at first, and against the wall 
of the adjoining building will be pathetically exposed in 
cross section the ghost of the dwelling displaced — the 
holes of ancient fireplaces, the marks of stairs, the 
patches of gay wall paper, no two rooms alike, mute 
witnesses to an era of bad taste. Why has no Locker- 
Lampson of the present written the ballade of those 
ghostly walls? What cheerful fires once blazed in the 
chimney holes? What vanished feet went up and down 
those stairs — hastening to a bridal or slow with the 
weight of years? Every day, from that chamber with 
pink-flowered wall paper, some one descended to break- 
fast. Why should not the daily descent to breakfast 
have its ballade, too? The smell of coffee and toasting 
bacon, the freshness of the morning, the high hopes for 
another day, the loved faces awaiting us below! We no 
longer descend the stairs to breakfast in New York. We 



BROADWAY 77 

have no stairs. We cannot afford more than one story. 
Who would find a ballade in going into the next room 
for breakfast? These ghostly cross sections are records 
of another way of life, and stare at us accusingly as we 
rip the dwellings down. 

Broadway itself seems to change less rapidly, perhaps 
because land is so costly there. Daly's and Wallack's 
Theatres, with their honourable traditions and poor 
acoustics, almost face each other below Greeley Square. 
But above the founder of the "Tribune" (guarding now 
the entrance to the underground tubes) tower two new 
hotels, facing to the west two tall department stores, and 
down a cross street are caught the gleaming white col- 
umns of the new Pennsylvania Railroad station. The 
Doges' palace where the "Herald" is printed has been put 
at the bottom of a well at last, for the department stores 
and hotels on Greeley Square are balanced by a great 
office building and a still greater department store be- 
yond Thirty-fourth Street. The canon has widened; it 
has not ceased. 

Here, at night, the Great White Way— which, to be sure, 
is golden— stretches north to the tower of the Times 
Building between and beneath a splendour of electric ad- 
vertisements that mocks the dark. Electric chariots race 
overhead. Great figures clad in incandescent under- 
clothes spar one with the other, proclaiming the flexibil- 
ity of the weave. A gigantic kitten sports with a per- 
petually unwinding ball of somebody's yarn. Brilliant 
signs announce farces and operas and musical comedies, 
and once in a blue moon the name of Shakespeare may 
make itself known in gold. Meanwhile along the walk 



78 NEW YORK 

passes an endless throng of men and women bent on 
pleasure, and through the roadway rolls an endless 
stream of cabs and motor cars, jewels and white shirt 
bosoms flashing within. 

The gaiety used to cease at Long Acre Square — a fine 
old name sacrificed to the vanity of a newspaper! — but 
it no longer ceases there. Long Acre, converted to Times 
Square, is but a widening of the Gay White Way, with a 
score of theatres electrically beseeching down the side 
streets, several great hotels and theatres walling the open 
space, the tall Times Tower presiding over the southern 
end, and at the other, where a wedge of masonry comes 
down between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, a veri- 
table geyser of electricity — bubbling mineral water, 
foaming beer, disappearing corsets, displayed from the 
roofs like fireworks against the sky. And still Broad- 
way goes on, with the crash of music from cafes and 
the roll of motors, and not until the Park is almost 
reached are the senses allowed to rest. 

Here is a giddy stretch of thoroughfare, to be sure, like 
nothing else in the world! It is so entirely given over 
to pleasure, and to those whose business it is to provide 
pleasure, that even by day the chorus girl and the actor 
predominate on the walks, and the rest of the world 
seems either about to eat at one of the innumerable 
cafes or to buy tickets at one of the innumerable thea- 
tres. Because it lives so exclusively its own life, too, 
there is a certain solidarity about it, almost a neighbourly 
quality. On nearly every corner someone meets some- 
one else whom he knows, and stops to chat. Men and 
women walk past in groups. Stands of photographs in 



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BROADWAY 81 

front of the theatres display faces that are familiar 
and speak of the gay evening to come. Broadway, the 
theatrical Broadway, never sleeps; its life goes on in 
perpetual round, a world apart and sufficient unto it- 
self. When evening draws on, and the matinee crowds 
pour out of the theatres and the Opera House, congesting 
the curbs with gay and chattering femininity, it may be 
a sunset worthy of Turner flames down a cross street 
and pours a purple radiance over the Times Tower; but 
nobody sees. All are scurrying for dinner, in the brief 
hush before the electric signs flare on and the evening 
sport begins anew. 

Of the social side of Broadway a volume might be 
written, for this dominant atmosphere of amusement 
sucks in the unwary like a spiritual maelstrom. Talent 
after talent, more especially, of course, dramatic talent, 
has come under its influence and lacked the character to 
resist. Broadway forgets or ignores the existence of the 
rest of the world. The deep and humble emotions of 
life, the commonplace experiences of mankind, which 
are the stuff of the greatest art, are not within its ken. 
He who would write of them, or he who would portray 
them by voice and gesture, forgets them all too soon if 
he allows the hectic gaiety of Broadway completely to 
capture his senses, till it seems to him the heady vintage 
wine of life, making the rest but flat and stale. One has 
no more to dread from the vice of the Gay White Way 
than from vice anywhere and always. But from this 
exclusive emphasis on amusement one has everything 
to dread; and its influence is writ largest upon our stage, 
which caters too exclusively to this Broadway patron- 



82 NEW YORK 

age. Moreover, it must be remembered by critics of our 
stage that New York's floating population numbers sev- 
eral hundred thousands each day, and a majority of 
these visitors are "here for a good time," as they would 
express it, when evening comes. Only the more frivo- 
lous theatrical entertainments appeal to them — a psy- 
chological phenomenon not unobserved in other capi- 
tals — and as their attendance is so considerable, the 
supply of frivolity is correspondingly augmented. 

Broadway is at its best pictorially on a stormy winter 
evening, when Opera House and theatres are in full 
blast, when cones of snow are piled near the curb like 
Eskimo huts, when the sloppy asphalt reflects the light 
from signs and windows, when the roll of carriages is 
incessant, and jeweled women with skirts held high dash 
from their motors across the wet walks to the theatre 
entrances, the snowflakes swirling in under the canopies 
to powder their hair. On such a night the myriad elec- 
tric signs aloft are less sharply outlined, and like King 
Arthur's helmet, make "all the night a steam of fire." 
Above them the rapidly condensing steam jets from va- 
rious roofs drift like banners of cloud across the white 
shaft of the Times Tower, now hiding, now revealing, a 
window square of pale blue vacuum light in the com- 
posing-room. There is a certain misty magnificence about 
the electric illumination and the towering hotels, defy- 
ing the dark and all the batteries of the storm. New 
York plays, as New York works, on a colossal scale. 

The transition from the Broadway of pleasure to the 
Broadway of cliff-dwelling domesticity is achieved by a 
mile of automobile warerooms and a fleeting glimpse, 



BROADWAY 83 

at Columbus Circle, of the Park. The street widens when 
the corner of the Park is passed, a strip of green run- 
ning down the centre roofing the subway. The great 
apartment houses that begin in the Sixties gain, unques- 
tionably, in dignitj r and proportion by this broader thor- 
oughfare, over their fellows on the narrow crossways. 
They gain a second dimension of breadth to counteract 
their height, and Broadway seems less a canon than a 
highway planned on magnificent scale. If all New 
York, we sigh, could only have been erected on streets 
of such proportion; if it had only been planned like 
Columbus, Georgia! 

But this is a new world of domesticity we have entered 
now, though the stranger might not guess it. We are in 
"the Upper West Side," amid the modern cave-dwellers, 
and though our way is flanked by towering buildings 
twelve and fifteen stories high, each family occupies 
less space, perhaps, than ever before was considered suf- 
ficient for a comfortable home. There are rows of 
separate houses on many side streets, to be sure, but 
they are rapidly becoming the exception, not the rule. 
Where the rent of a house reaches thousands of dollars, 
it must always be the exception, not the rule. These 
towering apartments are but innumerable layers of 
little cave-dwellings, and daily the cave-dwellers descend 
by the elevators, and are shot down town to business, 
under the ground. In a very important sense, then, life 
has grown more restricted even while its outward sym- 
bols have piled into mountains as nowhere else on earth. 
We are here aware of a myriad men in mass, not of 
individuals. Yet even here, in the great upper reaches 



84 



NEW YORK 



of the town which we have entered, where primarily 
men have sought but a cliff cave to eat and sleep in, the 
rose of beauty blooms on the brow of chaos, and a little 
art, a little luck, and a good deal of Nature, have con- 
trived for the seeing eye vista after vista of delight. Let 
us turn west to Riverside Drive in our search for them. 




VIII 
RIVERSIDE DRIVE 




VIII 
RIVERSIDE DRIVE 

Hiverside Drive is an incompleted employment of a 
natural resource. Crowning the steep east bank of the 
Hudson from Seventy-second Street northward almost 
to the end of the Island, it commands a superb prospect 
of the broad waterway, the abrupt Palisades, and the 
yellow sunsets. Yet commerce was here before munici- 
pal conscience awoke, and preempted the narrow strip 
of land between the river and the foot of the bank, build- 
ing docks and a railroad. The green park which plunges 
down from the Drive is held back from the water by 
freight cars, locomotives, steel rails. Some day, perhaps, 
these tracks will be covered, that the park may seem in 
effect to extend to the water's edge; but this blissful time 



88 NEW YORK 

is not yet. Our noble Drive sweeps above tooting loco- 
motives and belching coal smoke. That it triumphs so 
splendidly as it does is proof of what Nature has done 
for Manhattan Island. 

There is no uniformity to the houses and tall apart- 
ments which line the Drive on the east, facing the river 
and the setting sun. Indeed, would they be characteristic 
of New York if there were? They but carry out in dwell- 
ings the jagged sky line, the variegated colour, the sense 
of lift and drop, tower and mass and tower again, which 
marks the river view of the Lower Island. It was what 
might, without undue perversion of the truth, be called 
a false, or, worse, an unimaginative figure of speech 
Henry James employed to, as it were, hit off, or, in less 
expressive but perhaps equally correct language, de- 
scribe, the sky line of New York — that of an inverted 
broken comb. Our sky line has the irregularity of Na- 
ture, it is on so magnificent a scale. What, in a lesser 
scale, might conceivably be offensive, here is justified, 
as the mountains are justified for their caprices. 

Indeed, the sky line of Riverside Drive needs no justi- 
fication, even that of characteristic quality, if instead of 
advancing formally up the Drive by cab or 'bus we move 
leisurely on foot, our eyes alert for the charm of un- 
expected picture, our steps straying down through the 
park slope where a path invites, or even along the rail- 
road tracks and out upon the docks. The trouble with 
a great many people, even novelists, is that they are 
unwilling to exert themselves in search of the pictur- 
esque. It is the modern fashion to hunt beauty in a 
motor car — and beauty has fled to the by-ways. 



RIVERSIDE DRIVE 89 

So the by-ways of Riverside Drive are its greatest 
charm. It is delightful to stroll up the walk beside the 
rolling procession of pleasure traffic on a sunny spring 
afternoon, sensing on the one hand the human stream 
and the substantial dwellings, and on the other catching 
through the trees vista after vista of the blue Hudson 
below, with lithe, white yachts swinging at anchor or 
the decked-over hulk of an old-time frigate, still formi- 
dable with forty gun-ports to a broadside. Is anything 
more attractive than the sight of blue water through the 
tops of trees, on a spring afternoon? That phase of the 
Drive, however, is comparatively conventional and 
park-like, even as the white, Grecian canopy of the 
Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument which cuts delicately 
against the sky where the Drive swings on a bend — the 
superb curve of a highway following the natural con- 
tour of the land. Let us leave the beaten path and drop 
down the bank through the trees, crossing the railroad 
tracks to a pier. 

Look back now at the Drive. Where is the charm of 
uniform sky line to compete with that sudden piling up 
into a mortared peak of the apartment houses above, 
topping the green park? A little foot bridge comes 
stepping out of the green on stilts, crosses the railroad 
track with almost a Japanese grace, and drops down to 
the river. The hats of the procession on the roadway 
make a thin thread of colour weaving through the trees. 
And into the picture, with a belch of smoke and escape 
of steam, comes suddenly a locomotive, hauling a train. 
If evening is drawing on, that smoke and steam cloud 
lays a puffy, buoyant belt of living shadow against the 



90 NEW YORK 

lower trees, and, when the fire box is opened, the under 
side is lit with flaming rose. There are compensations 
in commerce, even on Riverside Drive! 

A spot where the new architecture has achieved an- 
other and more formal effect is at One-hundred-and- 
sixteenth Street. Here the crossway comes down a 
slope into the Drive, joined just before the Drive is 
reached by another street, the two flowing in with much 
the curve of a river, contracting and then expanding till 
the sides form two opposing semicircles. Around these 
semicircles are set two great apartment houses, or per- 
haps many apartment houses merged into two great 
circling cliffs. Retween these precipitous rotundities 
the eye follows up the roadway and sees the dome of 
Earl Hall filling the vista; and this while the beholder 
stands beneath green trees, with the calm blue Hudson 
to his left. 

Let us pass Grant's Tomb in silence. Just beyond, at 
least, an Architect who never fails us has been at work. 
Here the river bank swings in a trifle to the east and 
dips toward a deep hollow. We are at the northward 
brow of a height which commands an unparalleled 
prospect. Close by, splitting the Drive like an island, is 
an old Colonial mansion painted white, converted into 
an inn where the prices are in direct ratio to the eleva- 
tion. A flag flies on the green lawn. Then the eye leaps 
out to meet the view — the broad blue Hudson, truly 
called majestic, lazily melting into the northern haze, 
while from the far western bank nose on great nose of 
the Palisades pushes out a purple promontory, growing 
fainter and fainter into the miles of distance, till at last 



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RIVERSIDE DRIVE 93 

they are lost in what seems a waste of water. Here in 
New York is that point which Ruskin insisted on in a 
picture, the point which lets the eye out, the point which 
whispers of infinity. The teeming town behind is for- 
gotten here. The soul has gone adventuring. 

From this point the Drive does not dip, as the land 
does, to water level. New York is equal to the task of 
spanning a few hundred yards of ravine! A steel bridge 
of multiple arches, the girders frankly undisguised, 
carries the Drive across high in air. It is a great road- 
way which crosses, and here again a great bridge to meet 
the need achieves the charm of its efficiency. If we 
leave the Drive and seek the street beneath, we see the 
motors rolling overhead, against the sky. Under the 
arches we see framed the humbler street traffic, a ferry 
slip at the river, and across the stream the upright Pali- 
sades — a spacious picture in a yet more spacious frame 
of steel, on the magnificent scale of modern New York. 

The Drive goes on up the Island now, repeating or 
renewing its river vistas and sweeping curves. Should 
you find a boat and row out into midstream on a hot 
Saturday afternoon in summer, you would see the park 
like a green embankment at the foot of a white cliff 
wall of tenements, and at the foot of the green embank- 
ment, on every string-piece and float by the water's edge, 
hundreds upon hundreds of bathers, looking from the 
boat oddly like bifurcated water bugs. Plop — plop — 
plop — they dive into the water as you pass, others in- 
stantly taking their places on the crowded float. All the 
city is bathing, it seems, at the foot of its own walls. The 
dancing waves, the gleaming, bifurcated water bugs, the 



94 NEW YORK 

green Drive above, and then the white cliff of the apart- 
ments against the sky — that is the summer view of the 
upper town from the Hudson, unique, picturesque, and 
not without a certain comic quaintness inherent in the 
human animal undressed. 

The extension of the Drive also brings us into fast 
vanishing vestiges of the ancient regime, of the days 
when there were country mansions built of wood lining 
the banks of the Hudson, and the business men who 
dwelt in them took the morning train down to Forty- 
second Street where they transferred to a Broadway 
'bus. The Drive swings high above some of these houses 
now, shutting out their river view or pocketing them, as 
it were, under its embankment. Not many of them, 
however, remain, and perhaps in another decade none 
will mark the passing of the older order, unless the soci- 
eties that bear his name rally to preserve the home of 
Audubon, near One-hundred-and-fifty-fifth Street and 
the Riverside Drive extension. This frame house, built 
less than three-quarters of a century ago, then stood on 
a pleasant, wooded slope near the water, with a country 
landscape behind it and in front the broad Hudson and 
the three-hundred foot wall of the Palisades. Now it is 
pocketed by the Drive embankment, backed by a mixture 
of classic museums and tall apartments, "and no birds 
sing." The incongruity of its already rather dilapidated 
wooden walls amid this great acreage of stonework is 
pathetically wistful. Spruced up, as the phrase goes, 
duly marked with a conspicuous tablet, and set promi- 
nently apart, it might tell the passing world that here 
once a great man dwelt. At present, however, it is sadly 



RIVERSIDE DRIVE 95 

inexpressive to any but the chosen few who know its 
history. The more fanciful may fashion a fable out of 
the fact that one afternoon not half a dozen years ago a 
white-tailed, or Virginia deer, looking across from the 
Palisades at a point almost opposite Audubon's house, 
to the mortared palisade of Manhattan, suddenly took it 
into its silly head to pay the town a visit. It entered the 
water, and was swimming the Hudson industriously 
when the crew of a tug boat spied it, and with a hastily 
improvised lasso hauled the poor wild thing from the 
stream. It was not an escaped inmate of any zoological 
garden, either, but a true forest deer. 

But there is much of the Island to the east which we 
have missed. Let us retrace our steps a little, leaving the 
ravine beneath the arches by this forbidding gravel bank 
ahead. 

All Harlem was once such a wilderness of rocky cliffs 
and gravel banks, the haunts of goats and concealed 
squatters' shanties. Now they are being blasted and 
carted away or covered with streets and houses. But 
this one remains, rising abruptly from the grim gas 
tanks in a series of steep, irregular heaps of sand and 
stone. In the hollows are nomadic stables built of 
weathered boards roughly thrown together, and tiny 
huts of tin laid over caves scooped out of the bank. The 
faces of boys peer from these caves, and disappear 
again, like woodchucks. Other boys scramble on mys- 
terious and nomadic errands from mound to mound. 
Meantime, to the north, looking over this patch of waste 
and wildness in the city's heart, are the whitewashed 
rears of a long row of tenements, bare, ugly, uniform, 



96 



NEW YORK 



like some forbidding fortress. We might be storming 
the heights of Port Arthur, over ground ploughed and 
mined by the ripping shells. If you were a boy, you 
know that you would seize a stick for a bayonet and rush 
up the bank with a yell. Even as a man, you half expect 
to see a spit of flame from one of those forbidding tene- 
ment windows and hear the z-z-z-mm of a bullet. Yet 
look backward 1 Now almost level with your eye again, 
Riverside Drive is bearing its procession of gay pleasure 
traffic upon its great steel arches, and the Hudson rolls 
below. Your shoes are dusty and full of tiny pebbles, 
but you have seen another of those vivid contrasts, those 
stimulating surprises of the picturesque, in which New 
York abounds. 




IX 

KNbWLEDGE 

AND THE HOUSE-TOPS 




IX 

KNOWLEDGE 

AND THE HOUSE-TOPS 

New York has crowned Morningside Heights with a 
cathedral, a university and a hospital — with faith, hope 
and charity. To that rocky ledge between the Harlem 
flats and the Hudson, above Riverside Drive on the one 
hand and the dusty green strip of hillside park on the 
other, apartment houses have climbed and gained a 



100 NEW YORK 

foothold, also. Cathedral and university jostle with 
domesticity quite as in the Middle Ages — and, as then, 
rise above it and stamp this eminence of the town as 
their own. We are in cloistered and academic Manhat- 
tan, without the peace and age of the Seminary in old 
Chelsea, to be sure, a subway station on the one hand 
instead and a block of brand-new apartment houses on 
the other, and modern buildings naked of ivy, flush to 
the walk; but none the less bespeaking an architectural 
plan, and learning, and faith, and things less temporal 
than pleasure or commerce. 

On the southern end of Morningside Heights rises so 
much as is completed — the apsidal chapels, the choir and 
dome — of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. A cor- 
ner of Central Park is close by, and the apse, from 
below, seems to spring directly out of the green wall of 
Morningside Park. Backed up, then, to the edge of a 
cliff, the Cathedral already dominates unchallenged the 
western sky line, and looks eastward over a sea of sil- 
very roofs, mile after mile, while the discontented coun- 
tenance of John Ruskin in the spirit land is crossed for 
a moment by a smile of satisfaction. The Cathedral, 
however, is not a high building as buildings go in New 
York. Even when its spires are erected, the Woolworth 
Building, or the Singer Tower, will far out-top them. 
Yet while we are accustomed to tremendous external 
height, it is a curious fact that interior spaciousness 
in New York is so rare as to be a curiosity, and the 
beautiful waiting-room of the Pennsylvania Terminal 
will be ever more precious as the years pass. The great 
dining-room of the Harvard Club is a constant source of 



KNOWLEDGE AND THE HOUSE-TOPS 101 

astonishment, too, and it is perhaps only too typical of 
New York that nine times out of ten the visitor remarks, 
"Three stories high! Think of all the rent you sacri- 
fice!" The interior of the Cathedral, of course, even in its 
incompleteness, brings with a hushed surprise the sense 
of vastness and aspiration. Inefficient Gothic though it 
be, even the monumental apsidal columns cannot crush 
the soaring lines of this interior, nor cause mere heavi- 
ness and magnificence to seem, as is so often the case with 
us, to ape the task of spaciousness. Without, the Cathe- 
dral commands the cliffs and is set as a watch-tower of 
aspiration over the silvery sea of roofs. Within, as well, 
it brings to the spirit the mood of upward vision and the 
religious awe which lurk in organ roll and sky-borne 
shadows. Fit spiritual companion to it, old St. Luke's 
Hospital stands almost beneath its northern walls. 

Columbia University is a true New Yorker; it has 
changed its residence many times. Now, at last, on 
Morningside Heights, it seems to have settled down per- 
manently. Alas, that when it settled here on the heights 
it could not have preempted more of the land, extending 
its bounds to Riverside Park on the one hand, and to the 
brow of the rocky cliff on the other! The Cathedral has 
by so far the advantage of it. Morningside Park is not 
much of a park, only a wisp or two of dusty foliage 
straggling up the steep rocks, with paths and steps to aid 
the pedestrian, and lamps twinkling against the cliff at 
night to guide him. But it would have served as a splen- 
did setting for the eastern building wall of Columbia 
University, which might conceivably have crowned the 
ridge for a quarter of a mile with architecture nobly be- 



102 NEW YORK 

speaking its academic purpose. What a splendid thing 
that would have been! Now the university is almost 
hidden from the east by a skirmish line of apartments 
which have pushed up the heights and gained foothold 
along the top. Perhaps it is vain to speculate now. Like 
most American universities, Columbia did not anticipate 
its growth. As in all American universities, too, there 
are startling contrasts in its architecture; but the domi- 
nant impression when you draw close is one of plan and 
grouping, with the simple solidity of its great central li- 
brary as the key-note and a clean-cut efficiency and neat- 
ness everywhere. There has been here neither time nor 
space for broad, elm-hung campuses. This university is 
set amid a crowded modern city, and is the product of 
the hour. Yet the broad stone steps of the library, with 
their twin fountains and gold statue of Alma Mater, with 
their bordering hedges and groups of trees, the dome of 
the college chapel rising beyond, have a certain classic 
brightness, spaciousness and charm that make the scene 
both alluring and suggestive — suggestive of style, of high 
thinking, of academic seclusion even here in sight and 
sound of the roaring town. There is no inherent reason, 
of course, why ivy should suggest the study of Greek or 
differential calculus, or why elm trees should bring to 
mind comparative literature and analytic chemistry. 
Our universities, merely, have been long established, 
most frequently in smaller cities or towns where space 
and soil were to be had. The seats of learning that are to 
establish themselves in New York must work out other 
symbols, architectural rather than horticultural. The 
Columbia library and steps are an excellent beginning. 



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KNOWLEDGE AND THE HOUSE-TOPS 105 

Within the university enclosure the town is not ap- 
parent. Between the close-set, solid, efficient buildings 
is the stir and hum of student life. Behind is a green 
park; and in a corner of that park, separated from 
Amsterdam Avenue and the trolleys and apartment 
houses only by a fringe of rusty evergreens and an iron 
fence, lies the lazy, bronze figure of the great god Pan, 
playing his pipes above a lily pool. There is something 
delightfully incongruous about this naked, peak-eyed 
pagan turning his back upon the town and piping to the 
dusty park. What has he to do either with the modern 
town or with those thousands of students passing 
through the walks, with books of science beneath their 
arms? "Great Pan is dead." A glorified test tube, or at 
most an inoculated guinea pig of heroic size, should be 
set here as a monument. But the eyes of Pan leer enig- 
matically, and he keeps his lips upon the pipes. Sensi- 
tive to sounds and sights, inquisitive, eager, poetic, wild 
— that was the heart of Pan. So, after all, is he the fit- 
ting symbol here — for that is the heart of youth, which 
dares to fly from the bondage of the commonplace and 
conventional, which dares to dream and be deceived, 
which still stands free from the "shades of the prison 
house." Play on, Pan, beneath your dusty trees above 
the city roofs, the song of the untamed spirit, for, as a 
grave professor who walks daily before you has taught, 
Truth is forever in the making, perpetually renewed, 
and only the untamed spirit shall follow her beckoning 
feet! 

Columbia University has fostered or attracted other 
institutions of learning about it on Morningside Heights 



106 NEW YORK 

— Barnard College for women, across Broadway, on the 
battle ground of Harlem Heights; the Teachers College 
and the Horace Mann School; the Union Theological 
Seminary, now moved here from Park Avenue and in- 
stalled in a rectangle of scholastic Gothic so uncompro- 
misingly different, flush to the modern streets and de- 
void of ivy, that the eye cannot yet accept it into the 
scheme of things; and, latest of additions to the scho- 
lastic circle, the modest building of the Institute of Mu- 
sical Art. Standing beside the Union Seminary chapel, 
a little south of the music school, the narrow street 
ahead appears to run into a fragment of the primitive 
ledge, bending to the right and dipping down the hill. 
Behind the ledge rise the white walls of several distant 
apartments, grouping into a sharp peak. The dip of the 
road is abrupt. It plunges at once into the tenement city 
beyond. A few steps, and the scholastic atmosphere has 
gone. We are again amid the mountains of the cave 
men. 

But once more before we leave the Island does know- 
ledge triumph over the house-tops. New York City has 
its own municipal college, and that college it has builded 
upon a rock, a ledge which rises abruptly like Morning- 
side Heights from the silvery sea of roofs, with a green 
park clinging to it, and is crowned by the towers of the 
college as the other ledge is crowned by the Cathedral. 
The group of buildings which now house the College of 
the City of New York, like those housing the Union 
Theological Seminary, are rawly new. They, also, are a 
kind of scholastic Gothic, wrought of blocked, brown 
field-stone with glaring white trimmings which peril- 



KNOWLEDGE AND THE HOUSE-TOPS 107 

ously suggest a wedding cake. On three sides they form 
a rectangle, after the approved academic manner. But, 
on the east, where the cliff bends in a semicircle, they 
too follow the curve along the brow, forming here a 
great sweeping wall of masonry as superbly placed as 
any castle on the Rhine, and dominated by the lofty cen- 
tral tower. From far in the east this embattled wall and 
tower fill the vista of long cross streets between innu- 
merable tenements. Distance obliterates the raw mo- 
dernity. The college is an architectural beacon set upon 
a hill; nor are its portals closed to the poorest of these 
boys who play in the gutters. It looks down the long 
canons of the town, and over the shimmering house-tops, 
and says, "I, Knowledge, am still here, at the end of the 
climb!" It was a splendid thing for a municipal govern- 
ment so imaginatively to place its college, to dedicate to 
Learning one of its most magnificent building sites. One 
wonders how the miracle happened in New York! 

Now again we take up our northward march along the 
ridge of the Island amid the myriad cave-dwellings and 
the oppressive sense of a swarming humanity, while 
only here and there is a bit of green to shade the walks, 
or in some square beneath the shadows of tall apart- 
ments a classic building or group of buildings devoted 
to charity or the quiet researches of the scholar — the 
Hispanic Museum, the Numismatic Museum, and the 
home of the American Geographic Society, for example, 
with their treasured Velasquez and early editions of Don 
Quixote, and Roman coins, tempting the feet of the 
passer into hushed interiors, where they gather in the 
little Park that keeps green the name of the great Audu- 



108 



NEW YORK 



bon. But the charm of Manhattan, its picturesque sur- 
prises, its superb conquests of height and space, have not 
ceased yet. Wandering eastward, there is an old, white 
Colonial mansion before us on the brow of a hill, with 
the Harlem River suddenly sweeping into sight far be- 
low. Thither our footsteps turn. 




X 

THE END OF THE ISLAND 




X 

THE END OF THE ISLAND 

The Jumel Mansion crowns the bluff above the Harlem 
River at One-hundred-and-sixty-first Street. It is an 
excellent Colonial country house, dating back to 1758, 
when first-growth timber was to be had, the kind which 
lasts. From its doorway beneath the ancient fan-light, 
where now a portly policeman looks down into the base- 
ball stadium, once Washington gazed, and Lafayette, 
and Jefferson, and Talleyrand, and Louis Napoleon, and 



112 NEW YORK 

Aaron Burr, upon the deep, wild gorge of the Harlem 
and the winding ribbon of the Kingsbridge Road. 
About the dwelling (now converted into a museum and 
so saved from destruction) are immemorial lilacs, and 
behind it an old-fashioned garden where dusty holly- 
hocks struggle up and iris blades screen a tiny pool. 
The peace of this little garden is worth the savouring; it 
tells us more eloquently than any exhibit of colonial 
relics within the mansion what the New York of today 
has been obliged to sacrifice. And it is a quaint and 
pretty starting point for the final stage of our journey. 

To the right, down a sharp, wooded embankment, lie 
the Speedway, the tide-water river, the railroad tracks 
beyond, and then the steep opposite bank. The earth 
has begun to show green. The packed town is behind 
us. In front the Roman arches of High Bridge walk 
across the gorge. We are treading a rough dirt way 
now, amid a tangle of old trees. Presently we come to 
the end of High Bridge, with its slender tower rising 
above the foliage, and walk out over the ravine, seeing 
the river vanish to the southeast into the wilderness of 
docks and tracks and bridges and warehouses and misty 
roof-tops, and seeing it sweep in the other direction up 
the gorge beside the white Speedway and under the 
great spans of the Washington Bridge. The wild park 
continues along the steep western bank till the Washing- 
ton Bridge is reached. Here we slip down a path to find 
one of the most delightful pictorial surprises of the 
town. In front of us the bridge leaves the bank by three 
great stone arches before the first steel span makes its 
leap. Above these arches roll trolley cars and motors 



THE END OF THE ISLAND 113 

and carriages and drays, with a ceaseless procession of 
pedestrians beside the rail. The great structure is doing 
its appointed work. But the first massive arch which 
makes the work possible frames over its foreground of 
park a perfect vista of the winding river below and the 
high opposite bank up stream, green with aged trees and 
crowned with the classic dome of the New York Uni- 
versity Library and a hint through the foliage of the 
columnar Hall of Fame — a serene and pretty picture 
superbly set in utilitarian masonry. 

From the Washington Bridge onward the park is less 
apparent, and presently we come upon one of those 
quaint survivals of squatter sovereignty that are the 
more picturesque the more closely they are hemmed 
about by the town. Here, to the west, is a solid wall of 
apartment houses. There is a terrace behind them per- 
haps two hundred feet across before the bank plunges 
through the oak trees to the river. On this terrace, and 
on every smaller terrace down the steep bank where a 
clearing is possible, are tiny gardens — Italian informal 
gardens we might call them, for our squatters of today 
are no longer Celtic but Latin. These gardens are tri- 
umphs, too, of agricultural skill, since they are built on 
a rocky dump heap, with soil patiently carted from we 
know not where, nor would it, perhaps, be wisdom to 
inquire! Each garden is fenced with bits of broken 
board and dead twigs, tied together into palings, and as 
each is utterly formless, a group of them exactly re- 
sembles a jig-saw picture put together on the ground. 
Lettuce, cabbages, celery, corn, sprout bravely in these 
tiny gardens, and in one of them some more ambitious 



114 NEW YORK 

and aesthetic Italian has sought to achieve formality and 
flowers. In the centre of his twenty foot enclosure, so 
far as a centre can be determined, he has erected a min- 
iature summer house roofed with sheets of rusty tin 
and crowned on the peak with a geranium growing gaily 
in a tomato can. Vines climb up the four pillars of this 
architectural triumph, and from either end emerges a 
tiny path bordered with flowers — several precious feet 
sacrificed to beauty where food stuff might be growing! 
Down the steep bank not only gardens find foothold, but 
a dozen tumbledown gray shanties, where black-eyed 
Italian children swarm and on the Sabbath, upon ter- 
races packed hard and smooth, the men play an odd 
game of bowls. But over every cabin clamber vines, 
geraniums bloom in the windows, and the surrounding 
rows of lettuce and the towering oaks below add their 
touch to make these squatter shanties exotic and pictur- 
esque, the more as the apartment houses close by above 
the bank loom ever like a battlement against the west, 
to remind us of the mortared town. 

A few steps farther, and we reach Fort George. This 
great nose of the bluff once held the cannon which 
guarded the Harlem River ravine. Now it holds that 
chaotic and curious collection of roller coasters and 
Ferris wheels and donkey tracks and shooting galleries 
and peanut stands and sausage shops and laughing, 
jostling people, which denotes the American idea of 
cheap amusement. Fort George is exactly like Coney 
Island, without the ocean. It is exactly like a hundred 
"amusement parks" near Boston and Washington and 
Chicago and other American cities. It is as hot, noisy, 



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THE END OF THE ISLAND 117 

vulgar, crowded, as those Oriental bazaars we journey 
afar to see — and just as picturesque. Those perpetually 
revolving Ferris wheels against the sky, those spider 
webs of beams and braces which bear the roller coasters 
on their perilous voyages, that great curve of the street 
which is startling with a thousand colours from the thou- 
sand gay and flashy little shops and booths, or at night 
a blaze of incandescent illumination, combine into such 
quaintness and animation as, in a foreign country, 
would inspire our magazine editors to send artists and 
descriptive writers post-haste to the scene. Nor is the 
classic touch absent, even here. Peeping through the 
spokes of a Ferris wheel or looking over the sloppy 
tables in a cheap beer garden, we see the calm river far 
below, then the distant green bank, and rising above it 
through the trees the University Library dome and the 
columns of the Hall of Fame. The academic serenity of 
that landscape is in strange contrast to its frame, in 
ironic contrast, perhaps; but the sense of humour which 
relishes a little irony finds it but fairer so. Fort George 
is, after all, an honest expression of one phase of our city 
life, and, like all things honest, it would have its peculiar 
charm and flavour were it far less colourful than it is. 

Beyond the Fort George ravine the Harlem River 
swings rapidly toward the Hudson, and the Island nar- 
rows to its end. The spinal ridge along the western side, 
viewed across a little valley, is capped by trees and large 
estates, the widely separated houses looking odd after 
the miles of crowded apartments to the south. In a green 
park down by the Hudson the old earth ramparts of Fort 
Washington are still visible, and the rocks go down into 



118 NEW YORK 

the water. Here, indeed, the ramparts so screen the river 
bank from the road that once you have topped that green 
redoubt the city is put curiously behind you. Your feet 
are treading on slippery and unaccustomed shelves of 
rock instead of pavement. There is the smell of water, 
and the sound of it, too, as the waves lap in. On a 
boulder overhanging the stream sits an aged fisher- 
man, his bent back presenting to you the picture of a 
letter X, for the sun is warm and he has taken off his 
coat. He has no pole, only a line which he has flung 
far out and solemnly twitches from time to time, while 
a meditative puff of tobacco smoke rises from his lips. 
Perhaps it is a copy of Izaak Walton which bulges his 
pocket. Then, again, perhaps it is n't! Let us not too 
closely inquire, but continue on our way. The final 
nose of the Island is a wooded dome, where a few old- 
time wooden dwellings nestle in the trees and "Beware 
of the dog!" intimidates the trespasser. Some of the 
great tulip trees here must have been sturdy saplings 
when Washington's army fled into Westchester. The 
relentless march of town, the tide of commerce setting 
north and forever pushing the homes of its human 
agents farther and farther away, will some day wipe off 
these ancient houses, these tulip trees, this quiet piece 
of woods, and the last of the old regime will vanish from 
Manhattan Island. 

But that time is not yet. Manhattan still begins with 
a forest of skyscrapers and ends with a forest of trees. 
In the larger sense, of course, Man is but a part of Na- 
ture, and our forest of skyscrapers so considered would 
seem but a natural phenomenon, even if it did not, by 



THE END OF THE ISLAND 119 

its spontaneous irregularity of growth, resemble even 
to the outward eye a mortared mountain range. But 
Nature in the narrower sense is something dear to Man 
as a thing apart, serene, to soothe and comfort. Once he 
dwelt close to it, even on Manhattan Island. Now he has 
but a wild corner or two of Central Park and these old 
houses on the northward nose of the Island, amid their 
groves of tulip trees and oaks, to remind him of those 
simple days. It is, indeed, a pity that houses and groves 
must go, that the great white wall of apartments which 
lines the river front below must some day be extended 
till the Harlem breaks it — and who shall say how far 
up the mainland beyond? No bird sings in the canon 
slit of Wall Street. Here, at twilight, while the pink 
sky of evening broods over the solemn Palisades and 
tints the bosom of the Hudson, the vesper sparrow 
pours his melody. We turn back to the subway when 
our walk is done, we are shot down town into the canon 
slits — and we are a little wistful. "Stone walls do not a 
prison make?" That was not the burden of the spar- 
row's vesper song! 

Yet, without this wistful call of glade and green things 
at the edge of town it may be we should fatten stupidly 
on our own content, and perish of our pride in this new 
beauty we have created out of steel and stone, this 
beauty of chaotic vastness, of stupendous efficiency, of 
magnificent materialism. New York is a new city, a city 
dedicated primarily to commerce and adapted to handle 
commerce on a new and undreamed scale. It has the 
beauty of an engine perfectly built to perform its ap- 
pointed task, and it has further, by its colossal height 



120 



NEW YORK 



and bulk, the primitive beauty of the mountain crags 
and gorges. It has the charm of surprises and the pic- 
turesqueness of variety and contrast; and it was built by 
the pigmy Man, who is proud of it. But out of the north- 
ern hills flows the calm blue Hudson to wash the wooded 
rocks at the end of the Island, to whisper of the silent 
places and of far adventuring. The Bowling Green and 
Spuyten Duyvil, the modern mart and the ancient forest, 
the two extremities of our Island, thus hold in epitome, 
perhaps, the dual heart of Man. 




The Committee on Publications of The Grolier Club 
certifies that of this book two hundred and fifty 
copies were printed from type and original wood 
blocks on French hand-made paper, and three cop- 
ies with progressive proofs on Japanese vellum. 
The ten full-page illustrations were printed by 
Emile Fequet, Paris. 




